The practice of ichthyology is closely connected with Marine biology, Limnology, and Oceanography.
The title "father of ichthyology" belongs to Peter Artedi, a student of Linnaeus who identified five orders of "fishes" (including cetaceans) and divided those into genera. Artedi drowned by accident in an Amsterdam canal in 1735, and Linnaeus published his manuscripts posthumously.
During the 18th and 19th century, a steady stream of specimens from all parts of the world deluged museums.
In the 1780s Marcus Elieser Bloch published Ichthyologia as a series of volumes of plates, and after he died, his associate Johann Gottlob Schneider published the M. E. Blochii Systemae Ichthyologiae describing 1,519 species.
Georges Cuvier's Regne animal distribué d’après son organisation of 1817-1830 was a key step forward for fish classification, and Cuvier worked with his student Achille Valenciennes to produce the 22-volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons in the 1830s - though never completed, the work described 4,514 species.
Albert Günther published his Catalogue of the Fishes of the British Museum between 1859 and 1870, describing over 6,800 species and mentioning another 1,700.
The greatest ichthyologist around the beginning of the 20th century is generally considered to be David Starr Jordan, who wrote 650 articles and books on the subject, in addition to serving as president of Indiana University and Stanford University.