New Coral Off Costa Rica Gets Its Own Family
A coral found 360 to 529 meters deep off Costa Rica differs so much from known species that researchers created a new family, Laurinqueidae, naming it from Tolkien's Elvish tongue.
A team led by the University of Costa Rica has described a new coral found at a depth of 360 to 529 meters in the tropical eastern Pacific, and the find departed so far from everything already known that a separate family had to be created for it. The paper appeared on June 30, 2026, in the open access journal ZooKeys, volume 1283, with the discovery announced on August 11.
One description produced three new names at once:
- a new species, Laurinque elenya
- a new genus, Laurinque
- a new family, Laurinqueidae
The colonies are bright yellow, branch like trees and grow past a meter tall. They turned up in large numbers on rocky outcrops of seamounts near Cocos Island and along Costa Rica’s Pacific edge. The rock beneath them is almost entirely covered in brittle stars, star shaped relatives of starfish, so the yellow branches rise out of a field that, under a submersible’s lights, looks scattered with stars.
That is also where the name came from. The genus Laurinquë was drawn from Quenya, the Elvish language J.R.R. Tolkien invented for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and it means golden tree, a nod to the color and shape of the colonies. The species name, elenya, means starry in the same language, a reference to the brittle stars the coral was filmed among.
Samples were collected with the remotely operated submersible SuBastian, launched from the research vessels Falkor and Falkor (too), operated by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The first colonies were spotted during a 2019 expedition, more material was gathered in 2023, and three years passed between that second trip and the published description.
Why did one coral need a new family?
Because none of the existing families would take it. The team sequenced three genes commonly used to classify corals, and each one placed the coral in a different family, families that were not even related to each other. That level of disagreement between methods is unusual, and on its own it signaled something was off with the assumption that the species already belonged somewhere.
The answer came through phylogenomics, an analysis of hundreds of genes at once. It showed the coral belongs to no described family at all, but forms its own evolutionary lineage, most closely related to the family Eunicellidae, yet different enough both genetically and anatomically to warrant a new genus and a new family. The molecular analyses were carried out by Kelly McFadden, Catalina Murillo-Cruz and Andrea Quattrini.
The paper’s lead author, Odalisca Breedy of the University of Costa Rica, described in a statement from publisher Pensoft how the discovery unfolded, from the first dive to the final conclusion:
I first saw this garden of octocorals in 2019 and was in awe of the beauty of the landscape, which later inspired the elvish name of the taxon. I thought the species might belong to some known family and genus, but after a preliminary morphological analysis I realized this was something entirely different, something I could not link to any known taxa. In 2023 we collected more samples and, thanks to the exhaustive molecular analyses carried out by my colleagues Kelly McFadden, Catalina Murillo and Andrea Quattrini, we were able to determine the taxonomic position of this extraordinary species, found at one of the most puzzling sites.
Morphology, then, gave the first signal, and genetics confirmed and sharpened it. The order matters: it explains why seven years passed between the first encounter and the published name.
Coral gardens as a vulnerable ecosystem
Gardens like this one rank among the vulnerable marine ecosystems, since they provide a structurally complex habitat for a large number of other deep sea organisms. That is also why describing a single species is not just cataloging: without a name and a place in the taxonomy, a species is hard to bring under any protection regime at all.
Seamounts off Costa Rica have for several years now been producing an ever longer list of undescribed organisms. The deep ocean covers roughly two thirds of the planet’s surface and remains largely unsurveyed. The expeditions on which the coral was collected were funded by the Schmidt Ocean Institute and a research grant from the National Geographic Society.
The species description establishes that this is a separate lineage, but it does not say how old that lineage is or when it split off from related families. The statement also gives no estimate of how widespread or abundant the colonies are beyond the surveyed sites, nor a conservation status under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria. For now the sites are known only from seamounts near Cocos Island and Costa Rica’s Pacific edge, at depths of 360 to 529 meters, so the true boundaries of its range cannot be discussed until a wider area has been surveyed.
