A hidden coral reef thrives off the coast of Benin

In the 1960s, fishing surveyors in the Gulf of Guinea hauled up fragments of coral in their nets. The discovery was largely ignored, buried as a single paragraph in a 130-page report, and the site was eventually written off as a lifeless relic. Because the world has lost more than 50 percent of its coral reef area since the 1950s, many researchers assumed any remnants of the reef had long since succumbed to bleaching or overfishing.