Hundreds of meters below the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica, a remotely operated vehicle swept its camera across a seafloor carpeted in brittle stars — and found something that stopped researchers cold. Rising from the rocky outcrops were tall, vivid yellow branches, tree-like and almost luminous against the dim deep-sea backdrop. Scientists aboard the research vessels Falkor and Falkor (too) watched the live footage and recognized immediately that what they were seeing didn’t match anything in the record books.
A meter-tall yellow coral unlike anything on record
The coral turned up during expeditions in 2019 and 2023, at depths ranging from 360 to 529 meters along seamounts near Isla del Coco and Costa Rica’s Pacific margin. Researchers used the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian, deployed from the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s vessels Falkor and Falkor (too), to collect physical specimens from the rocky seafloor.
Some colonies stretch more than a meter tall. Their vivid yellow branches spread outward in a tree-like pattern — striking even by the standards of deep-sea life, where strange forms are the norm.
Dr. Odalisca Breedy of the Universidad de Costa Rica led the research. She recalled seeing the octocoral garden for the first time in 2019 and being struck by the beauty of the landscape. Her initial instinct was that the coral might belong to a known family, but a closer morphological look told a different story: this was something she simply couldn’t match to any existing species.
An elvish name born from a deep-sea landscape
The coral wasn’t just visually striking on its own. It was especially abundant on rocky outcrops where brittle stars blanketed nearly every available surface, and the yellow branches rose above that shimmering carpet like trees in a forest — an almost otherworldly scene that stayed with the researchers long after the dive footage ended.
That image shaped the naming process. The new genus, Laurinque, draws from Laurinquë — a word meaning “golden tree” in Quenya, the Elvish language J.R.R. Tolkien constructed for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The coral’s color and tree-like shape made the reference feel fitting rather than forced.
The species name, elenya, means “stellar” or “of the stars” in Quenya — a nod to the dense brittle-star populations surrounding each colony. Together, the names capture what the team described as an almost mystical elvish landscape on the deep ocean floor.
When standard genetics couldn’t place it anywhere
Naming the coral was the easy part. Placing it on the evolutionary tree proved far more difficult.
Scientists began by sequencing three genes routinely used to classify corals, and the results were contradictory — each gene pointed toward a different, unrelated family. That kind of inconsistency is unusual. It signaled that standard methods weren’t going to be enough.
The team escalated to phylogenomics, a technique that compares hundreds of genes simultaneously rather than a handful. The broader analysis gave a clearer picture: the coral doesn’t belong to any previously recognized family. It sits closest to the family Eunicellidae, but its genetics and anatomy differ enough that grouping it there would misrepresent its true evolutionary position.
A new family written into the tree of life
The solution was to build the coral its own branch. Researchers formally established the new family Laurinqueidae and the new genus Laurinque specifically to house the species.
The findings were published in the open-access journal ZooKeys, supported by the Schmidt Ocean Institute and a National Geographic Society research grant. Dr. Breedy noted that pinning down the species’ taxonomic placement required exhaustive molecular analyses carried out by an international team — including colleagues Catherine McFadden, Catalina Murillo-Cruz, and Andrea Quattrini. No single method or researcher could have resolved the puzzle alone.
Why deep-sea coral gardens matter far beyond taxonomy
This discovery doesn’t stand alone. It adds to a growing list of undocumented species found on Costa Rica’s seamounts, a region that has repeatedly surprised researchers in recent years.
The broader context matters. The deep ocean covers roughly two-thirds of Earth’s surface, yet it remains one of the least studied environments on the planet, and most of what lives there has never been formally described.
Deep-sea coral gardens are classified as vulnerable marine ecosystems. Their complex, three-dimensional structures provide habitat for many other species, making them important centers of biodiversity in places scientists are only beginning to understand.
Laurinque elenya is a reminder of how much the ocean still holds in reserve — and of how much could be lost before it’s ever found. Every new family added to the tree of life raises the same quiet question: how many more are still down there, unseen?
Complete study: Odalisca Breedy, Catherine S. McFadden, Catalina Murillo-Cruz, Ana-Belén Yánez-Suárez, Katleen Robert, Andrea M. Quattrini. A coral among stars: A new octocoral family (Anthozoa, Octocorallia, Malacalcyonacea) from seamounts in the tropical eastern Pacific. ZooKeys, 2026; 1283: 253 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.1283.191899
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