1) The earliest reports of coronaviruses date back to the late 1920s when an respiratory disease affected chickens in North America. 2) The first human coronaviruses were discovered in the 1960s in the UK and US through two different techniques. 3) By 1967, the structures of IBV, B814 and 229E were analyzed using electron microscopy and shown to be morphologically similar, having club-like spikes, establishing them as a new family of viruses called coronaviruses.