26/02/2025
WHAT ARE THEY?
The oldest coral fossils date back to 535 million years ago. Corals similar to what we see today appeared 295 million years later, around the time of the early dinosaurs, marine reptiles, ferns, and conifers. It is equally fascinating to track the evolutionary history of our understanding of corals. Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus (c.372-c.285 BC) puzzled over what he called the ‘kouralion’- a ‘root-like’, mineralised creature whose identity he felt lay somewhere between a plant and an animal.
Naturalists 2,000 years later continued to debate on whether corals were shrubs that turned into stone when exposed to air. Corals in the 16th and 17th centuries were of great concern to voyagers who dreaded having their boats wrecked by dangerous formations that appeared seemingly out of nowhere in the ocean. Trading of these strange stone-forming ‘gems’ became extremely popular during this time, especially the red coral (Corallium rubrum).
Today we know for a fact that corals are animals, related to jellies, anemones and others in the phylum Cnidaria that use stinging cells to capture their prey. With a few exceptions, corals are typically sedentary colonies made up of individual ‘polyps’. Each polyp looks like a soft cavity with a rim of tentacles lining the mouth to catch plankton.
The brilliant corals we see at the bottom of the ocean are animals, the most extraordinarily wild architects on earth, and they use stinging cells to capture their prey
