The Zoological Museum of the University of Patras was founded in 1968 as a result of the efforts of Professor I. Odrias. Today, it operates under the auspices of the Department of Biology, specifically under the Section of Animal Biology. It is housed in the building of the Departments of Biology and Mathematics on the university campus in Rio, Patras.

The over 60 display cabinets of the exhibition showcase a large number of mounted (or otherwise preserved) animals, mainly representing the Greek fauna. These give the visitor the opportunity to familiarise themselves with wild animals of their area and obtain information about them.

The museum tries to showcase the animals within their natural environments, using carefully created likenesses of those environments and dioramas within the display cabinets.

The species in the exhibition are in their majority vertebrates, such as bony fishes, cartilaginous fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. However, a number of samples also display invertebrate groups, such as sponges, corals, mollusks, earthworms, insects and crustaceans and echinoderms.

The collections of the Museum house over 3500 samples of vertebrate species. The collections can be visited freely for research purposes by any researcher who would like to do so.

In 2018, the Museum has begun to digitize its collections in the framework of the research project "Ornithopolis". These new additions include an electronic catalogue of the specimens in the collections, provide access to virtual specimens over the internet and focus on environmental education via new material on urban biodiversity.