A Review of the Dinoflagellates and Their Evolution from Fossils to Modern
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Molecular clock and biogeochemical evidence indicate that the dinoflagellate lineage diverged at around 650 Ma. Unequivocal dinoflagellate cysts/zygotes appeared during the Triassic. These biotas were badly affected by the end-Triassic extinction and recovery from this was relatively slow. During the early Middle Jurassic, the family Gonyaulacaceae underwent an explosive diversification event and taxonomic richness steadily increased throughout the rest of the Jurassic. The entire Cretaceous also recorded increases in diversity. This trend reversed during the Oligocene, probably caused by global cooling. Marine cyst-forming peridiniaceans declined substantially through the Oligocene and Neogene, but protoperidiniaceans continued to diversify. Modern taxa, as evidenced by the molecular tree, comprise three major clades: the first two are composed largely of parasitic forms, marine alveolates of unknown identity and the Syndiniales; free-living dinoflagellates form the third clade, which diverges rapidly and bears short branch lengths with no real support for branching order. This suggests that morphological divergence preceded molecular divergence because, as the fossil record indicates, major groups appeared at different ages. Unique features of the dinoflagellates helped the group take on a predominant role in the marine phytoplankton. Living in marine or fresh water, dinoflagellates have demonstrated innovative capacities that have enabled them to live among the phytoplankton or benthos as autotrophic, heterotrophic, mixotrophic free-living organisms or symbiotic and/or as parasitic forms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".