On 16 October 2023 the arm of the robot SuBastian closes on a yellow branch, 362 metres below the surface of the Pacific. The seabed is rock, covered by a carpet of Ophiacantha brittle stars, sea stars with thin, whip-like arms. They are packed so tight that they bury the base of the corals. The ship is the Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor (too). The seamount is called Las Gemelas II and lies south-west of Cocos Island National Park, in Costa Rican waters.
That branch is now the holotype, the specimen that anchors a species name. It is catalogued as MZUCR 3884 in the Zoology Museum of the University of Costa Rica. The species is Laurinque elenya. Odalisca Breedy of the University of Costa Rica and five colleagues from Costa Rica, the United States and Canada described it in the open-access journal ZooKeys. The paper was received on 17 March, accepted on 28 May and published on 30 June 2026. The publisher's press release reached the aggregators on 7 October. To house the coral the authors had to create a new genus and a new family, Laurinqueidae.

The names come from Quenya, the elvish language J.R.R. Tolkien invented. Laurinque means golden tree. Elenya means stellar, after the field of brittle stars where the species lives.
It is an octocoral, a relative of sea fans whose polyps carry eight tentacles. It builds no reef and hosts no algae. It has a dark protein axis and a thin rind armed with sclerites, needles of calcium carbonate a tenth to half a millimetre long. Alive it is bright yellow. In alcohol it turns brown. The holotype is 50 centimetres tall and 60 wide. In the family diagnosis the authors describe colonies more than a metre tall and 1.2 metres wide.
Six specimens are described, the holotype and five paratypes, the specimens that back it up. Five come from the two Las Gemelas seamounts, between 360 and 412 metres. The sixth was collected in 2019 by the first Falkor on a feature of the Pacific margin known as Seamount 6, at 529 metres. That is the deepest record for the species. On Las Gemelas II the colonies form extensive gardens. On Las Gemelas I they are sparser, and on Seamount 6 scattered.
The water they live in holds almost no oxygen. Probes measured between 0.5 and 3 micromoles per kilogram, values typical of what oceanographers call the oxygen minimum zone. Temperature ranged from 8.1 to 10.8 °C.

The most interesting part of the work is not the colour. It is how the coral was classified. Octocorals are usually sorted with three genetic barcodes, short stretches of DNA that tell species apart. Two come from the mitochondria, the mtMutS and COI genes. The third is a piece of nuclear ribosomal DNA, 28S. Here each gene gave a different answer. mtMutS put the species among the Incrustatidae, with full statistical support. COI put it among the Eunicellidae. 28S could not place it clearly.
To settle the question, the group of Andrea Quattrini at the Smithsonian in Washington and Catherine McFadden at Harvey Mudd College sequenced two specimens. They read ultraconserved elements, stretches of genome that change little over time and turn up in distant species. Each specimen yielded between 1,934 and 2,236 of them. A tree built on 153 of these loci, compared across 393 octocorals, places Laurinque next to the Eunicellidae, as a sister group, but outside the family. A larger matrix of 1,385 loci gives the same result. mtMutS alone, the authors note, would have produced a false assignment. Lineages this old need hundreds of genes.

The sister family is not exotic. The Eunicellidae include the yellow sea fan Eunicella cavolini, which divers meet on rocky walls across the Mediterranean. The Costa Rican coral is a relative, separated by a history long enough to earn a family of its own.
The authors write that the Laurinque gardens may qualify as Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems as defined by the FAO, and note that the sites lie close to the Cocos Island park. They propose no protective measures. They also report possible sightings of the species off Panama and the Galápagos, but these are personal observations awaiting confirmation.
The work was funded by the National Geographic Society and the University of Costa Rica. The robot dives were run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The sequences are in GenBank and the data on FigShare. The paper carries no statement on competing interests or on the use of artificial intelligence tools.

References
Breedy O., McFadden C. S., Murillo-Cruz C., Yánez-Suárez A.-B., Robert K., Quattrini A. M., "A coral among stars: A new octocoral family (Anthozoa, Octocorallia, Malacalcyonacea) from seamounts in the tropical eastern Pacific", ZooKeys, 1283, 253–272, 30 June 2026, open access (CC BY 4.0). doi: 10.3897/zookeys.1283.191899
Study data: GenBank sequences PZ137000–PZ137003, PZ102191–PZ102194, PZ101450–PZ101454; BioSamples SAMN60142225 and SAMN60142226; FigShare deposit doi: 10.25573/data.32246517
Pensoft Publishers, press release carried by ScienceDaily on 7 October 2026 (used only as a tip).