This short account is an invited contribution to the Zootaxa special volume 'Twenty years of Zootaxa.' Zootaxa was first published on 28 May 2001. Between this date and December 2020, 116 papers were published in Zootaxa that mention Bryozoa, comprising mostly descriptions of new species and higher taxa, but also including molecular sequencing (e.g. Fehlauer-Ale et al. 2011; Taylor et al. 2011; Franjevic et al. 2015), invasive-species research (e.g. Ryland et al. 2014; Vieira et al. 2014), checklists (e.g. Vieira et al. 2008), classification (e.g. Bock Gordon 2013), bryozoans as associates of other organisms (e.g. Rudman 2007; Chatterjee Dovgal 2020; Chatterjee et al. 2020), metazoan phylogeny (e.g. Giribet et al. 2013), biographies of historical figures who worked on bryozoans (e.g. Calder Brinkmann-Voss 2011; Calder 2015) and a catalogue of the fossil invertebrate taxa described by William Gabb (including 67 bryozoan species) (Groves Squires 2018). Of the 116 papers, 15 (13%) were open-access.