Scholars have devoted attention to animal behavior since Antiquity. One of the first was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who described, for instance, the waggle dance of honeybees, the courtship kissing of pigeons and the parental transmission of singing behavior in songbirds. However, while there were notable naturalists in Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is only from the 17th century that animal behavior sciences underwent a steep growth. Historically, a wide variety of scholars contributed to animal behavior, under different labels, each of which has become a field of its own. In particular, in the period 1500-1975, three main fields contributed to the development of animal behavior science: natural history, comparative psychology and ethology.

The formal establishment of these fields with their explicit name follows a chronological sequence. The first of these fields is natural history, and in particular its subpart that can be defined as behavioral natural history. The label 'natural history' has been used since Antiquity, as early as the 2nd century when it was employed to refer to the work of the Roman naturalist Plinius the Elder. Between the 16th and the 18th century, Conrad Gessner, Pierre Belon, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Martin Lister, Johann Anderson, Michael Bernhard Valentini, Georges Buffon and Charles Bonnet were among the main contributors to natural history.

At the end of the 18th century, the field of comparative psychology was formally identified by Michael Hissmann. In the early 19th century, the contents and scopes of comparative psychology were defined by authors such as Baldassarre Poli and Louis François Lélut. However, it wasn’t until the second half of the 19th century, largely under the influence of Darwin’s writings, that comparative psychology was propelled through the work of Pierre Flourens, Henri Joly, William Lauder Lindsay, George Romanes and Conwy Lloyd Morgan and many others. By the end of the 19th century, comparative psychology was institutionalized as an official university course in both Europe and America. Discussions and controversies erupted over the role of natural selection, vitalism, tropisms, instinct, behaviorism and learning.

Finally, in the mid-19th century, the new field of ethology was proposed to refer to the study of the behavior of non-human animals. In the first half of the 20th century Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen laid the experimental and conceptual groundwork for modern ethology, winning in 1973 the Nobel Prize for their contributions to animal behavior science.

In the present Research Topic, focus involves the historical contributions to animal behavior sciences from the period 1500-1975, i.e. the period from 1500 to the start of the contemporary age (conventionally defined as the past 50 years).

The collection encourages articles on the following aspects:

• Analysis of specific historical works on animal behavior
• Biographical sketches of animal behavior authors
• Review of historical contributions to a specific behavioral topic
• Review of the behavioral contributions from a specific historical context
• Description and interpretation of historical theory on animal behavior
• Analysis of the evolution of the views on animal behavior in human society
• History of human-animal interactions

All the taxonomic subfields of animal behavior science are welcome, including behavioral mammalogy, behavioral ornithology, behavioral herpetology, behavioral ichthyology and behavioral entomology.

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History of Animal Behavior Sciences: Behavioral Natural History and Comparative Psychology in the period 1500-1975