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Despite the research to ensure Australian prime lamb carcases remain a premium meat, there are no objective carcase assessment tools which enable economic incentives to be translated to producers of high meat yielding lambs. Consequently, a probe developed in Iceland, the Icemeat probe, was investigated as a tool for measuring the tissue depth at the Greville (GR) site. To this end, 1087 lambs were measured at two abattoirs over a period of 4 months using the device and a GR knife on every lamb. Agreement was assessed by linear regression and by graphical analysis for systematic patterns of disagreement. Overall, these results highlighted increasing variability of the Icemeat probe measurements with increasing GR tissue depth. Therefore, further developments are required prior to industry adoption. • An Icemeat probe was assessed for its potential to measure tissue depth of lambs over the 12th rib. • For leaner carcases GR tissue depth measures were routinely underestimated using the Icemeat probe. • The variability of the probe measurement increased with increasing GR knife measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]