The Fish Collection was begun by Dr. C. McLean Fraser, the first head of UBC’s Department of Zoology, in the 1940s. Some specimens date back as far as 1903, but cataloguing didn’t begin until 1945.
A new era of expansion began in 1952 when the Institute of Fisheries was formed at the University of British Columbia. M.A. Newman was appointed as part-time curator of the collection in 1953 when the collection consisted of 973 entries representing over 1400 specimens. He instituted a new cataloguing system, transferred the collection from formalin to isopropyl alcohol, and built the first vats for the storage of large specimens. Between 1953 and 1956 the collection increased rapidly, due to three expeditions to the eastern tropical Pacific at the invitation of H. R. MacMillan, the addition of extensive local freshwater material by members of the B. C. Game Commission, and several exchanges with institutions in other parts of the world. By the end of 1956, the collection contained some 1970 catalogued collections, representing about 1180 species.
In 1960, the collection was moved to the Biosciences building, where it continued to grow to its current size of almost 350,000 records. Dr. Wilbur Clemens, G.V. Wilby, and Drs. Casimir Lindsey, Norman Wilimovsky, and J. Donald McPhail each expanded the collection greatly over the decades. In 1999, Dr. Eric Taylor became the director and oversaw the move of the collection to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in 2010 where he continued to oversee the collection until 2026 when Dr. Colin Brauner became the director. Dr. Nicolas Bailly, as the curatorial assistant, has been instrumental in conducting a complete re-inventory of the collection and modernizing its databasing system.