The taxonomic knowledge of living dinoflagellates (comprising about 2500 species) is scanty and restricted to few specialists worldwide. Nevertheless many new dinoflagellate taxa have been described over the last decades. The last worldwide revision of dinoflagellate species was published in 1937. Since then the taxonomic characterization of many species and genera has been changed or emended. Any taxonomic work starts with the original descriptions of the taxa that are often scattered in variou