Ichthyology has been studied at Harvard since long before the founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859. By the late 1700s, William Dandridge Peck, the first professor of Natural History at Harvard, had collected and published on New England fishes. Peck's specimens were skinned, dried and glued to paper sheets; some are still in the MCZ collection to this day.
After the MCZ was founded the fish collection grew rapidly and has had a long history of active ichthyological research.