Early scientific investigations carried out on the Stony
Corals of Sri Lanka date back to the work of Ridley (1883), Ortmann (1889) and Bourne (1905) who reported on the solitary corals collected by Professor Herdman from the Pearl Banks in the Gulf of Mannar (Report on the Pearl Oyster fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar, Part III, 1905). More recently Pillai (1972) reported a total of 90 species of stony corals divided among 39 genera' of which 27 genera and 70 species were hermatypic. Scheer, in 1984 reported 40 hermatypic coral genera based on previous records and his own collections from Hikkaduwa in the south western coast of Sr'i Lanka (Mergner and Scheer, 1974).
Based on a recommendation made at a UNESCO/UNEP Coral Tax­onomy training course held in Phuket, Thailand in 1984, De Silva and Rajasuriya have used whenever possible,* the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences' Monograph series (Parts 1 to 5 on Scler-atinia of Eastern Australia) to eliminate synonymous taxa in compiling their checklist of stony corals of Sri Lanka.