The evolutionary transition of vertebrates (the animals with a backbone) from water to land is a major chapter in animal evolution. The vertebrates conquered the land about 370 million years ago, giving rise to a remarkable diversity of body proportions and a wide array of feeding, locomotory, and sensory adaptations. Early land vertebrates or tetrapods (literally vertebrates with four limbs) are of great interest to the scientific community because they can illuminate the rise of modern terrestrial ecosystems and the deep roots of much of today’s terrestrial vertebrate diversity. Last but not least, this topic is of great interest for the public at large because research on early tetrapods is also the study of our own remote ancestry.

The last few decades have witnessed a rapid increase in our understanding of vertebrate terrestrialization, fuelled by outstanding palaeontological discoveries, sophisticated techniques for 3D image analysis of fossil organisms, and advanced methods for building evolutionary family trees. At the same time, palaeoecological, stratigraphic, and geological data are shedding new light on the ancient environments where early land vertebrates diversified.

Research on early tetrapods and their closest fish-like relatives (the so called tetrapodomorph fishes) has featured prominently in the pages of Fossil Record, which celebrates its 25^th anniversary in 2023. To mark this event, we aim to produce a special volume of this journal that brings together international scientists working on multiple cross-disciplinary aspects of vertebrate terrestrialization. The special issue will be edited by Marcello Ruta, Nadia Fröbisch and Florian Witzmann.

Submission will be possible from May 1^st 2023 until April 30^th 2024.