Dinoflagellate
History

In 1753, the first modern dinoflagellates were described by Henry Baker as "Animalcules which cause the Sparkling Light in Sea Water", and named by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1773. The term derives from the Greek word δῖνος (dînos), meaning whirling, and Latin flagellum, a diminutive term for a whip or scourge.

In the 1830s, the German microscopist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg examined many water and plankton samples and proposed several dinoflagellate genera that are still used today including Peridinium, Prorocentrum, and Dinophysis.

These same dinoflagellates were first defined by Otto Bütschli in 1885 as the flagellate order Dinoflagellida. Botanists treated them as a division of algae, named Pyrrophyta or Pyrrhophyta ("fire algae"; Greek pyrr(h)os, fire) after the bioluminescent forms, or Dinophyta. At various times, the cryptomonads, ebriids, and ellobiopsids have been included here, but only the last are now considered close relatives. Dinoflagellates have a known ability to transform from noncyst to cyst-forming strategies, which makes recreating their evolutionary history extremely difficult.
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