Anyone familiar with KU’s Natural History Museum has run across the towering stuffed grizzly bear or the remains of Comanche, the horse that survived the Battle of Little Bighorn.

But those are a mere drop in the pond of what is housed in the campus building.

“At any one time, less than 1 percent of the stuff that we have behind the scenes is on display in the museum,” says Andy Bentley, a collection manager at the museum.

In terms of his area of expertise – ichthyology (the study of fish) – even less than that is available to the public eye.

“There’s not a single fish from the collection that’s on display,” says Bentley, a native of South Africa who’s been with the museum for nearly six years.

This ichthyologic collection contains more than 750,000 specimens from 77 countries.

“But the majority of our collection is Midwest and freshwater material, which is obviously because of our location – and those are our strengths,” he says.

The collection grows at a rate of 10 percent per year and already takes up two floors of the museum’s “wet wing.”

Ichthyology curator Edward Wiley explains that the collection’s function mostly involves research within the field.

“We are essentially a vast lending library,” Wiley says.

In fact, the majority of KU museum space is used for research instead of public display. And jars of preserved eels don’t exactly draw crowds, anyway.

“Museums are becoming more kid-driven – bells and whistles, computer terminal-type stuff,” Bentley says. “There’s very little interest in even the (foyer’s) panorama here. It’s just static animals standing there. Nowadays, it’s more interactive with computer displays and playing games. Museums are going in that direction.”

No matter. Bentley says there is plenty of “weird and wonderful stuff” in his fish collection. And he’s unafraid to dive right in during the tour, not bothering with gloves when handling everything from ethanol-preserved sharks to cryogenically frozen samples to just plain freaky denizens of the deep.

FANGTOOTH: Bentley says, “This guy can consume fish about the same size as himself. He can dislocate his jaw so he can open it up to be able to get large food in. This is part of the guy they used for ‘Finding Nemo’ – the one with the big long teeth in front and a light organ on his head. They bastardized three fish to put that one together.”

LONG-NOSED GAR

“The majority of them are from Kansas. These guys get to 6 feet long and about 100 pounds. (You don’t encounter them) as frequently as you used to because, as with everything else, the rivers in Kansas have been overfished.

“They’re piscivores. They feed off other fish. (But) if you got your hand caught in their mouth, it would rip your hand to shreds.”

CLEARED AND STAINED: “They’re all stored in glycerin. It’s basically another way of looking at the skeleton of the fish. … What they do is drop these things into a digestive enzyme called trypsin. It eats away all the flesh of the specimen, and it leaves the bones and cartilage behind. They put it in two different stains. The blue stains the cartilage blue, and the red stains the bones purple. So you can see where all the bones fit on the body.”

ELECTRIC RAY: “He’s got this gelatinous substance in his body that he uses to create an electric current across the polarity of saltwater. They live in sandy environments, bury themselves in the sand, wait for things to swim close enough, then give out this jolt of electricity that stuns their prey. They can regenerate their current in less than a second. I stood on one of these things in an estuary. It’s not fun. It’s literally like sticking your finger in a plug. Then I jumped up in the air and landed back down on him again.”

COELACANTH (“LIVING FOSSIL”): “It’s known from the fossil record about 60 million years ago, and it’s basically been unchanged since then. It was thought to be extinct until 1938, when the first one was collected off the coast of South Africa. … This one was collected in 1986 from Grand Comore.

“The fact that it has this low tail and low fins, it’s thought to be one of the precursors to the movement onto land. It’s thought that the fins were precursors to legs. Basically, by calling it a living fossil, what people are saying is it’s known from the fossil record and it’s basically unchanged since then.”

CRYOGENICS: “Here, all of our tissues get stored in minus-80 degree freezers. … This is one of the largest fish tissue collections in the U.S. We’ve got about 8,000 tubes of tissue from about 35 countries around the world.

“(It’s for) doing genetic analysis of all these different families and species and how they’re related to each other. … Traditionally, people would look at the morphometrics of species: count the number of fins, count the number of bones in the backbone, look at the scales – all those things to see how fish were related. … Now they’re using DNA to do the same thing, and they’re finding all sorts of problems with the morphometric data. So species are being moved from one genus to another, from one family to another. It’s just causing chaos.”