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ADMIN NOTE: This was split out from the Fossil of the Month entry thread, as it strayed from the intent of that topic. It was decided that this might be useful as a learning tool. Thanks, Franz. Slow month so far but hopefully not everybody is out shopping for Halloween costumes and are instead taking advantage of the autumn temps to go out and add to their collections. Hoping to see the usual last minute addition of some enviable finds. Atlantic corals are something I know just a bit about (the extant ones anyway). A few years back the reef coral family Mussidae was analyzed using analysis which combined new DNA evidence along with the traditional morphological methods of classifying corals. Former students of a coral reef scientist friend of mine published an important paper resulting in the reclassification of several modern corals. ANN F. BUDD, HIRONOBU FUKAMI, NATHAN D. SMITH, NANCY KNOWLTON, Taxonomic classification of the reef coral family Mussidae (Cnidaria: Anthozoa: Scleractinia), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 166, Issue 3, November 2012, Pages 465–529, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.2012.00855.x The upshot of this as it applies to the genus Montastraea is that it now only contains Montastraea cavernosa, a species with large exerted "vocano-like" polyps which are roughly 5.5-7.5 mm in diameter and contain 36/48 septa. Here is a living Montastraea cavernosa colony: The other three extant species of Atlantic corals formerly in Montastraea were moved to the resurrected genus Orbicella (O. annularis, O. faveolata, and O. franksi). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbicella These species (and the various hybrids or intergrates between them) have much smaller polyps (2.1-3.5 mm) with 24-26 septa. This genus is one of the primary reef building corals in deeper fore reefs. Here is an example of a living colony of Orbicella faveolata: I have no idea if taxonomic changes in the modern (extant) corals have any effect on what may be ancestral corals from the Miocene fossil record. I guess we would have to either know an invertebrate paleontologist (which I do) or find some papers online dealing with these Miocene (Badenian) corals that were published since the 2012 revision. If I can find further information, I'll post it here. Cool coral--whatever genus it belongs to currently. Cheers. -Ken