A meter-tall golden coral off Costa Rica was so strange scientists created a new family for it

Colonies of a bright yellow, tree-shaped coral can stand taller than one meter on seamounts off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, and nothing about its genes or anatomy fits an established family. Odalisca Breedy of the Universidad de Costa Rica and five co-authors have built a new one for it, Laurinqueidae, to hold the species Laurinque elenya.

The description fills pages 253 to 272 of ZooKeys volume 1283, and it names a family, a genus and a species in a single paper, with Breedy as lead author and Catherine McFadden, Catalina Murillo-Cruz, Ana-Belen Yanez-Suarez, Katleen Robert and Andrea Quattrini as co-authors.

A yellow garden among brittle stars

Living colonies are bright yellow and branch into large, irregular, fan-shaped trees. The diagnosis in the ZooKeys paper says colonies can exceed 1 meter in height and 1.2 meters in width, while the single holotype specimen is up to 50 centimeters tall and 60 centimeters wide. Once preserved in the lab, the colonies fade to brownish, so the yellow that gives the genus its name belongs to the living animal on the seafloor.

The coral was collected between 360 and 529 meters down. On the Las Gemelas pair of seamounts, southwest of Cocos Island National Park, it sat at roughly 362 to 412 meters, and the authors treat that shallower band as the core of its range. The deepest record, 529 meters, came from a site the authors call Seamount 6, which makes the species a resident of cold, low-oxygen water well below the reach of sunlight.

The species name carries a picture of the place. Genus and species names are drawn from the Quenya language, with Laurinque meaning “golden tree” and elenya meaning “stellar,” a nod to the brittle stars crowding the rock around the colonies. In its August 11, 2026 release on the paper, publisher Pensoft described the coral growing in large numbers on rocky outcrops nearly covered by brittle stars. Breedy said she first saw the octocoral garden in 2019, years before the 2023 return trip that supplied the type specimen and the formal description.

Three genes, three different answers

Classifying octocorals usually leans on a short list of genes, and here those genes disagreed. In the paper, the mtMutS tree pointed to the family Incrustatidae, the COI tree pointed to Eunicellidae, and the 28S rDNA tree resolved poorly. No single marker gave a stable home.

The authors settled it with a much bigger data set: ultraconserved elements and exons, 153 loci in all, with 75 percent taxon occupancy. That analysis placed the genus as the sister lineage to Eunicellidae, close enough to be a relative and distinct enough to sit outside it. Catherine McFadden, Catalina Murillo-Cruz and Andrea Quattrini ran the molecular work, and Breedy credited them in the account published by The Brighter Side.

Anatomy backed the DNA. The axis is proteinaceous and dark brown with a hollow, cross-chambered core, the polyps are tubular and elongated and partly retract into low mounds, and the colonies lack the symbiotic algae that shallow reef corals depend on, a condition the paper calls azooxanthellate. Breedy described it as “something very different” from every known group she tried to match it against, according to that account.

Two research cruises and one robot

Every specimen came from dives by the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian, launched from Schmidt Ocean Institute ships. The 2019 collections were made from R/V Falkor, expedition FK190106, and the 2023 collections from R/V Falkor (too), expedition FKt230918. The holotype, catalogued as MZUCR 3884, was collected on October 16, 2023, on the second Las Gemelas seamount from 362.53 meters on ROV dive S0601. Funding came from the Schmidt Ocean Institute and a National Geographic Society research grant.

The ground had already been productive. In a February 2019 announcement, the institute said a three-week Falkor expedition led by Erik Cordes of Temple University had surveyed seven seamounts for the first time, forming a corridor from the mainland toward Cocos Island, and had found at least four new deep-sea coral species. The survey was meant to support a proposed marine protected area around the seamounts, which would shield them from fishing and potential mining, and that same ground is where the new family was later collected and described.

A family with one member so far

Laurinqueidae is placed in the order Malacalcyonacea and currently holds one genus and one species. A family is a high rung of the classification ladder, so creating one for a single coral amounts to a claim that the lineage split from its nearest relatives long enough ago to deserve its own branch rather than a place inside Eunicellidae.

The paper’s own title, “A coral among stars,” points back to the brittle-star-covered seafloor where Breedy first saw the colonies. ScienceDaily carried the story on October 8, 2026, nearly two months after Pensoft’s release.

For now the family is known from a short list of places: the Las Gemelas pair, Seamount 6, and one site on the Costa Rican Pacific margin, between about 360 and 529 meters, all reached by a single robot over two cruises.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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