Tavira 2009 was a pioneer experience for the organizers, the scientific committee and the local organizing committee, as well as a daring challenge for all participants. The common interest in fish skeletal biology was the driving force to bring together, for the first time, scientist from different biological disciplines such as palaeontology, morphology, developmental, evolutionary biology, biomechanics, systematic, genomics, proteomics, biomedical research, nutrition and aquaculture. But the question remained: Would we be able to talk to each other? Would it be useful to meet and to discuss with colleagues that we usually do not meet in the frame of our regular congress schedule? The answer was yes. It was useful. We had fruitful discussions and we could learn from each other. We could also establish new collaborations about fish skeletal research across disciplines. By contributing with 45 articles to a regular issue of the Journal of Applied Ichthyology, which came out in 2010, we published the state of the art of fish skeletal research. Thus it is our great pleasure to organize the 2^nd International Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches in Fish Skeletal Biology. We keep the format of the first meeting. We again put emphasis on discussions and exchanges during and after the sessions. And again we offer the possibility to publish your contributions to this workshop. We welcome all participants, we thank you for coming to Tavira and we hope you will not only find the meeting enjoyable but also scientifically stimulating.

Organizers

M. Leonor Cancela and P. Eckhard Witten

Scientific committee

Matthew Harris, Santosh P. Lall, Isabel Palmeirim, Jean-Yves Sire, Tom Hansen, Stefan Schulte-Merker, Marisol Izquierdo, Harald Rosenthal