Sixty years after surveyors first uncovered evidence of a sprawling coral reef off the West African nation of Benin, scientists have at last found the reef. In the 1960s, fishing surveyors off West Africa’s Benin coast hauled up heads of coral in their nets. And as mass bleaching events and overfishing slashed the world’s coral reef area by more than 50 percent since the 1950s, local oceanographers had written off any remnants of a possible reef as dead. More than six decades on, the mystery has been solved as a team of Beninese scientists rediscovered the healthy reef teeming with marine life. At least eight coral types and eight fish species have formed a thriving ecosystem on this long-forgotten site.