Dear readers,

This year, the journal Zoomorphology celebrates it′s 90th birthday. Reason enough to look back into the history. The journal was founded as a German journal and has changed it′s title four times during the years. The first issue was published on April 17, 1924, under the name “Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Ökologie der Tiere” (translated as Journal for Animal Morphology and Ecology), edited by P. Bucher and P. Schulze. Unfortunately, no editorial was published, so the reasons for establishing this journal are not passed down to younger generations. Starting with volume 61 in 1967, ecology (Ökologie) was abandoned from the title. The reason was given in a small note by the editors (W. E. Ankel, P. Ax, P. Buchner and W. Hennig) and the publisher. Ecology had expanded during the past years and applied more and more experimental methods. Therefore, it was decided to split the journal into an ecological branch (Oecologia) and a morphological branch (Zeitschrift für Morphologie der Tiere). Eight years later, starting with volume 82 in 1975, the title was shortened drastically to “Zoomorphologie,” but with the English undertitle “an international journal of comparative and functional morphology.” Editors were at that time P. Ax, W. Hennig, O. Kraus, G. Kümmel and G. Osche. This change of title was certainly a first answer to a trend of “internationalization” in science. Still, the majority of articles in volume 82 were in German, but two articles were published in English and two in French. This trend to internationalize science and to communication in one language, English, continued. For countries not using English, this was a strong challenge, especially for scientific publications. The majority of journals changed their name to become more international. In 1980, Zoomorphologie also took this step. Fortunately, a change of two letters for one were enough to gain an English name, Zoomorphology, which was still in the tradition of former names. At that time, 1980, a large team acted as editors: P. Ax, W. Bock, R. B. Clark, R. Eakin, O. Kraus, G. Kümmel, G. Osche, R. M. Rieger and V. Ziswiler. This team of editors, four from Germany and five from other countries, also expressed the international ambitions of the journal. A last change that deserves notion is the change of format in 1984. One hundred and three volumes were published in a rather small volume, from volume 104 on issues were published in larger format. For a scientific branch in which images are so important, this step was a very important one. I would like to thank especially the two latest Editors in Chief, Otto Kraus (1977–2002) and Thomas Bartolomaeus (2003–2011) for their impact on the development on the journal.

During the years, Zoomorphology has published hundreds of articles on animal morphology. Many of them are important contributions to the field of animal morphology. Together with the Journal of Morphology, Zoomorphology is among the two leading journals in its field. This is motivation to keep on making Zoomorphology an excellent journal!