Researchers exploring underwater mountains off Costa Rica have found a coral that doesn't fit any existing family. The bright yellow, branching colonies, some over a meter tall, were collected between 360 and 529 meters below the surface using a remotely operated vehicle during expeditions in 2019 and 2023. Because its appearance and DNA were unlike anything previously described, the team established a new family, Laurinqueidae, and a new genus, Laurinque.
The species name, elenya, and genus name together mean "golden tree of the stars" in Quenya, the Elvish language invented by J.R.R. Tolkien. That name reflects the scene on the seafloor, where the coral's yellow branches rise from rocky outcrops densely covered with brittle stars. Lead researcher Odalisca Breedy of the Universidad de Costa Rica said the landscape inspired the name and that initial morphological analysis already suggested the coral was something very different.
Standard genetic barcoding initially gave conflicting results, with three different genes pointing to three different families. Only a broader phylogenomic comparison of hundreds of genes revealed the coral's true position: a distinct lineage most closely related to Eunicellidae but different enough to warrant its own family. The discovery, published in ZooKeys, adds to a growing list of undocumented species from Costa Rica's seamounts and underscores how little is known about deep-sea ecosystems, which provide critical habitat for other marine life.