L. polyedra are often the cause of red tides in southern California, leading to bioluminescent displays on beaches at night.

This cyst was first described by Deflandre and Cookson in 1955 from the Miocene of Balcombe Bay, Victoria, Australia as: "Shell globular, subsphaerical or ellipsoidal with a rigid membrane, more brittle than deformable, covered with numerous long, stiff, conical, pointed processes resembling the blade of a dagger.

"[1] Its stratigraphic range is the Upper Paleocene of eastern USA [2] and Denmark [3] till Recent.

[7] Lingulodinium polyedra are easily visible under 100x magnification (use the 10x or "scanning" objective on most compound microscopes) and their scintillons luminescence in response to surface tension and acidity.

Because of this obvious rhythms (and also due to the fact that most its activities, physiological and molecular, are rhythmic) L. polyedra has been a model organism for studying clocks in single cells.