At age fifteen, Thomas Barbour was taken to visit Harvard University, which, entranced by its Museum of Comparative Zoology, he later attended.

Having received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from that university, Barbour joined the faculty in 1911 when his doctoral dissertation was published, and he took on the position of curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

He particularly enjoyed Panama, Costa Rica, and Cuba, which he visited at length on at least thirty occasions beginning in 1908, generally staying in Soledad at the Harvard Botanical Gardens, now known as the Jardin Botanico de Cienfuegos.

[3] In 1923 and 1924, he was one of the scientists and financial benefactors who founded the Barro Colorado Island Laboratory in Panama, location of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

The island, originally a hilltop, sits in the middle of Gatun Lake, which was created when the Chagres River was dammed during the Panama Canal building project.

[1] A two-year honeymoon took them through remote reaches of the Dutch East Indies, India, Burma, Java, China, and New Guinea with Barbour's wife helping him to photograph animals and collect specimens.

The family home was on Clarendon Street in Boston's Back Bay, with summers spent in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

"[4] The Harvard Australian Expedition (1931–1932), as it became known, was a six-man venture led by Harvard Professor William Morton Wheeler, with the others being Dr. P. Jackson Darlington, Jr. (a renowned coleopterist),[5][6] Dr. Glover Morrill Allen and his student Ralph Nicholson Ellis,[7] medical officer Dr. Ira M. Dixon, and William E. Schevill (a graduate-student in his twenties and Associate Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology).