Radio galaxies are unique cosmological probes. As with radio-loud quasars, the presence of luminous radio continuum and optical line emission enable radio galaxies to be observed and recognized at large distances, up to z = 4.2. However, unlike the situation for most quasars, their optical emission can be spatially resolved from the ground and studied in detail.

Progress in detecting distant radio galaxies has been rapid in recent years due to the use of CCDs and the exploitation of new selection criteria. Now, more than 60 radio galaxies are known with z > 2. More than half of these have been found by our group by concentrating on radio sources with the steepest spectra, most of these in a “Key Programme” of the European Southern Observatory. Although several people contributed to this Key Programme, most of the work was done by Huub Röttgering, who presented his Ph.D thesis in January and Rob van Ojik, who succeededhim. Redshifts of 1.5 to 4 correspond to a time when the Universe was 10% -20% of its present age. This was a crucial period in history when galaxy formation must have been rampant. It corresponds to the AGN era, a two-billion year “delta function” in the population evolution of luminous quasars and radio galaxies, when their space-density rose to a value several hundred times larger than the present density before the species mysteriously and suddenly became almost extinct.