ABSTRACTUltrathin epitaxial Co layers grown on Au(111) show strong perpendicular magnetic aniso-tropy resulting in out-of-plane magnetization in thin films. With increasing Co thickness the increasing contribution of the shape anisotropy leads to a reorientation transition of the magnetization which has already been subject of many other studies. In the dynamic in-situ experiments reported here bulk Au(111) is replaced by epitaxially grown Au(111)/W(110). The high time resolution (0.05 ML Co deposition per acquisition cycle) allows to extract several mechanisms which occur during the spin reorientation transition.