The fish collection is housed in Room 242 of Lappin Hall, along with amphibian, reptile, insect, and mammals collections. Most collections are from the eastern third of Kentucky, with extensive holdings from the Licking River, Red River, Tygart's Creek, and Little Sandy River drainages.
Marine fishes are primarily from the Gulf of Mexico, near the Mississippi Sound.
Most fishes were collected after 1970, although we have about 200 historically valuable fishes collected by Welter in the 1930s from the Licking River drainage. The bulk of the ichthyological collection is due to the efforts of Dr. Les Meade, naturalist and professor at Morehead State University. Many of the fish collections were as part of class field trips during the 1970s and 1980s when Dr. Meade was the instructor for Ichthyology at Morehead State University. Recent additions to the collection include species new or poorly represented in the collection, species of special biological interest, documentations of range extensions, and collections from regions not previously represented in the collection. Since 1997, these efforts have resulted in the addition of about 110 species new to the collection.