The three volume book, Corals of the World, produced by Charlie Veron and Mary Stafford-Smith from which this website has developed, took shape during the late 1990s and was published in the year 2000. Soon after the publication of the CD-Rom, Coral ID, in 2002, Lyndon DeVantier and Emre Turak joined the team and this website is a result of the collaboration of this core team. However, many taxonomists, researchers, photographers and others have made invaluable contributions (see Acknowledgements).