The fishes collection in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Vertebrate Zoology is worldwide in scope, with an emphasis on marine species. Strengths include: deep sea fishes from the Atlantic and Pacific; Western Atlantic nearshore fishes from the United States, Bermuda, Bahamas, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea; East Pacific fishes from Mexico, Panama and Peru; Indian Ocean nearshore fishes from Kenya, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles and Chagos Archipelago; and freshwater fishes from Connecticut, Guyana and the African Great Lakes. Holdings represent over 24,000 specimen lots made up of more than 144,000 individual specimens. Included in this are type specimens for 193 nominal species.  The collection includes histology slides and a complete coelacanth specimen.

The history of Ichthyology at the Peabody Museum includes that of teh Bingham Oceanographic Foundation.  In the late 1920s a separate collection of fishes, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection, came to Yale and operated as a independent entity until the 1960s, when it and the Peabody collections were integrated. Recently, the holdings of the George M. Gray Museum, formerly administered by the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, were donated to Yale and have been incorporated into the Division’s collections.

The Yale Peabody Museum’s collections are available to legitimate researchers for scholarly use. Loans are issued to responsible individuals at established institutions. Loans and access to the collection can be arranged through the Collections Manager.