Morphological and Molecular Characterization of Five Species Including Three New Species of Golden Gorgonians (Cnidaria: Octocorallia) from Seamounts in the Western Pacific.

Members of genus Verrill, 1883 are the typical deep-sea megabenthos with only seven species reported. Based on an integrated morphological-molecular approach, eight sampled specimens of from seamounts in the tropical Western Pacific are identified as three new species, and two known species Watling, 2007 and Xu, Zhan, Li and Xu, 2020. sp. nov. is unique in having a very broad polyp body base with stout and thick scales. sp. nov. can be distinguished by rods present in both polyps and coenenchyme, and sp. nov. is characterized by having numerous verrucae in coenenchyme and irregular spindles and scales in the polyp body wall. Phylogenetic analysis based on the nuclear 28S rDNA indicated that sp. nov. showed close relationships with Watling, 2007 and sp. nov., and sp. nov. formed a sister clade with . In addition, due to Watling, 2007 nested into the clade in mtMutS-COI trees and shared highly similar morphology to the latter, we propose to eliminate the genus by establishing a new combination (Watling, 2007) comb. nov. and resurrecting Nutting, 1908.