The Marine Invertebrate Collection was founded in the 1930’s by Ian MacTaggart Cowan and C. McLean Fraser. Primarily used for teaching, this collection holds several thousand specimens collected from BC and around the world, including cephalopods, bivalves, corals and sponges.

The Collection has recently been greatly enhanced by the generous donation of the Evelyn Hebb Killam and Alice Stein seashell collections, which represent a substantial representation of marine diversity from throughout the world. Cataloguing of the Collection is still in its infancy, but many specimens are recorded in sufficient detail to be of value to the broader scientific community. They contain several uncharacterized fossils and some extremely rare variants in natural populations, such as sinistrally (left-handed) coiled shells.