Welcome to the Department of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History

The Department of Ichthyology represents one of four research departments within the Museum's Division of Vertebrate Zoology.  The Department maintains one of the world’s largest and most rapidly growing ichthyological collections. The Department’s staff and students are committed to the care and growth of the collections and to collections-based anatomical and molecular systematic research. All departmental curators and most of the department's affiliated students and researchers maintain active field programs that continue to augment the Department's collections, including major recent freshwater acquisitions from Madagascar, the Congo, and South America, as well as numerous marine collections from throughout the Indo-Pacific, the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, the mid-Atlantic ridge, and deep-sea collections from the eastern Pacific and Taiwan. Specific research topics and corresponding fieldwork are determined by the departmental scientists and overseen by the curators. All three curators in the Department have a strong commitment to graduate and postdoctoral training in morphological and molecular systematics, bioexploration and fieldwork, biogeography, conservation, and evolutionary biology through the diversity of graduate programs available at the AMNH, including cooperative PhD programs with Columbia University and the City University of New York (see the Museum Office of Grants and Fellowships or contact the Department curators for more information).

About the Department

     History of the Department

     Collection History

     Bashford Dean Memorial Library

   Now available: Bloch reproductions

    Contact