Most of the history of rotifer research has been a chronicle of Western Europe with the first efforts including some of the notables of early microscopy. The study of rotifers began with the microscopist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723); he is credited with their discovery and, in his long series of letters to the Royal Society in London (Dobell, 1960), was their first true student. Other early work includes that of Louis Joblot (1645-1723), Otto Friderich Müller (1730-1784), Bory de St. Vincent (1778-1846), Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795-1876), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), C.T. Hudson (1828-1903), and P.H. Gosse (1810-1888)--the latter two published their important work "The Rotifera or Wheeled Animalcules" in 1886. Most early workers considered rotifers to be ciliates, including Linnaeus. It was Cuvier who eventually recognized the special status of rotifers as metazoans and placed them in a special order within Infusoria, "Les Rotiferes". The French worker Paul Marais de Beauchamp (1883-1977) was one of the first to take rotifer work beyond species lists. His studies on anatomy and physiology are still a standard from the discipline.

Work in the early part of the 1900s included the following: C. Wesenberg-Lund(1866-1955) (Denmark ), who made significant contributions to the understanding of cyclomorphosis and sexual periods; Adolph Remane (University of Kiel), who studied marine rotifers and gastrotrichs (Remane 1929) and wrote the most comprehensive, albeit unfinished, treatise on rotifer biology and systematics to date (Remane 1929-1933); Kurt Wulfert (1891-1970) (a German amateur); Josef Hauer (18881970) who studied the fauna of Germany, India, Indonesia, and South America; Pater Josef Donner (1909-1989) produced a detailed study of the biology and systematics of terrestrial and aquatic bdelloids (Donner 1965); Jerzy Wiszniewski (Poland) studied psammic rotifers (e.g., Wiszniewski 1947); Bruno Berzins (1909-1985) a Latvian who spent most of his career in Sweden, accumulated an immense amount of on rotifer ecology (many were published posthumously by Pejler (e.g., Pejler and Berzins 1989). For a more complete account of the European workers (up to ca. 1950) consult the work of Koste and Hollowday (1992).