A history of tardigrade science

From a "little water bear" under an eighteenth-century microscope to genomes, space flights and a crash on the Moon. We charted 3,789 papers on tardigrades by year, from 1847 to today, and marked the moments that changed the field.

Naming them

Tardigrades are still being discovered faster than ever. Of the 1,550 species recognised today, 255 were described in the 2020s so far, more than in the whole of the 2010s (226) and more than in any earlier decade.

The people who named the most species that still stand, counting every co-author:

1. Pilato 206
2. Michalczyk 131
3. Kaczmarek 126
4. Binda 110
5. Lisi 100
6. Kristensen 87
7. Gąsiorek 82
8. Stec 66
9. Mihelčič 54
10. Murray 53
11. Dastych 53
12. Maucci 52

1. 1767
   Eichhorn sees a "Wasser-Bär"

   Johann Conrad Eichhorn watches a water bear among freshwater algae in June 1767, six years before Goeze; he published it in 1775. Ramazzotti & Maucci 1983, p. 22

2. 1773
   Goeze sees a "little water bear"

   Johann August Ephraim Goeze describes the kleiner Wasserbär under his microscope. 250 years of tardigrades (2025)

3. 1777
   Spallanzani names them "slow steppers"

   Lazzaro Spallanzani calls the animal il tardigrado, the slow stepper, which gives the phylum its name. Tardigrada (Spallanzani 1777)

4. 1774
   The first revival on record

   Bonaventura Corti sees his "brucolini" (little caterpillars) come back to life in water after drying in gutter sand, two years before Spallanzani, and notes they must dry slowly. Ramazzotti & Maucci 1983, p. 22

5. 1840
   Doyère describes Hypsibius dujardini

   The species name that the lab tardigrade carried until 2018. Gąsiorek et al. 2018

6. 1859
   A commission on resurrection

   The Société de Biologie in Paris meets about 42 times over whether dried animals are truly alive. Its report confirms revival after 82 days in a dry vacuum and half an hour at 100 °C, but cannot decide whether life was suspended. Ramazzotti & Maucci 1983, p. 83

7. 2008
   Tardigrades survive open space

   Animals carried into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission survive exposure to space vacuum. Jönsson et al. 2008, Current Biology

8. 2015
   The genome controversy

   A first genome claims a sixth of tardigrade genes came from bacteria; a rival assembly shows most were contamination. Boothby et al. 2015 and its rebuttals

9. 2016
   A protein that shields DNA

   The Ramazzottius genome yields Dsup, which protects human cells from X-rays. Hashimoto et al. 2016, Nature Communications

10. 2017
    Glass-forming proteins

    Tardigrades use intrinsically disordered proteins (CAHS) to survive drying. Boothby et al. 2017, Molecular Cell

11. 2018
    The lab tardigrade gets its own name

    The lab strain is shown to be a new species, Hypsibius exemplaris. Gąsiorek et al. 2018, Zootaxa

12. 2019
    Tardigrades crash on the Moon

    Dried tardigrades aboard the Beresheet lander hit the Moon; a 2021 test showed they would not have survived the impact. Nature Astronomy 2020; Nature 2021

13. 2026
    Tardigraph

    We join the published scans, films, lineages and genomes of one species into a single animal, and open it to everyone. This site

Each milestone links to or names the source it rests on. The corpus is the set of works we collect and read for this project; it will keep growing.