Author: Andrew Baird

The nomenclature recently published open-access by Crosbie et al. (2026), in the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, provides one of the most important piece of information for testing the validity of the 2,338 current nominal species of extant hermatypic Scleractinia – the type location (for the importance of the type location, see Bonito et al. 2021). In the recent past, some coral taxonomists have used difficulties in access to resources such as the original descriptions, type material and type location as the reason to work within the “accepted” taxonomic framework. Thanks to this now-published work by Project Phoenix, the much needed information is easily accessible for rigorous hypotheses testing.

The nomenclature represents a monumental amount of time and effort from the team at Project Phoenix. I estimate it took over 3,000 hours to produce the nomenclature, not including time visiting the various institutions around the globe, which explains why this has not been done before. We firstly located all 360+ papers – or authorities – in which the nominal species are originally described. We then scoured these authorities to find the original descriptions of each nominal species. The original descriptions generally list the type location, however, if not we employed a significant amount of detective work to determine where the type material was likely to have been collected.

Clues that allow us to infer a type location when it is not mentioned in the original description include the name of the person who collected the specimen or the name of the ship or the expedition on which the specimen was collected. For example, the type location can often be determined by reading the journal of the naturalists on these early Voyages of Discovery (e.g. M. F. Peron’s journal) or the Captain’s log from the ship on which the specimen was collected (e.g. a case study of Acropora teres). Other clues include labels that accompany the type material, or in the catalogue of the institution where the type material is held. Therefore, as part of this work, we also visited over 20 museums in at least 10 countries to image the type materials and the associated labels.

Another complication is that the original descriptions are written in many different languages which we first had to translate, thanks to our international, multilingual team and Google Translate. We then worked out the contemporary geographical names for these type locations, many of which have changed through time.

The nomenclature is the latest example of Project Phoenix delivering on our promise to provide the resources to allow everyone to be involved in one of the most significant endeavours in coral reef science in our times – producing a workable, testable, reproducible, and hence, robust coral taxonomy.

Data Availability

Crosbie et al. 2026 is open access and available on the Memoirs of the Queensland Museum.
The database that accompanies the nomenclature will be updated annually and is available at Figshare.
A map of the type locations can be viewed here.

All authorities we examined are available on request to augustine.crosbie[at]my.jcu.edu.au or andrew.baird[at]jcu.edu.au.

In addition, Project Phoenix has now curated type images for over 1,000 of the 2,300+ nominal species of extant hermatypic Scleractinia. These images are also available on request.

Acknowledgements

In addition to those we thank in the paper, we would like to thank all those associated with Corallosphere, in particular Danwei Huang, for the citations and PDFs of a large number of the authorities, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library as the source of many of these old manuscripts.

Works Cited

Bonito VE, Baird AH, Bridge T, et al. (2021) Types, topotypes and vouchers are the key to progress in coral taxonomy: Comment on Wepfer et al. (2020). Mol Phylogen Evol 159:107104

Crosbie AJ, Bridge TLC, Mera H, et al. (2026) A nomenclature for the extant hermatypic scleractinian corals including type locations and taxonomic status for 2,338 nominal species. Memoirs of the Queensland Museum – Nature 67:1–10