This article was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Soft corals discovered off the coast of Benin. Gérard Zinzindohoué / IRHOB 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. Employed by local governments to assess fish diversity and discover potentially trawlable seabeds in the sandy-bottomed Gulf of Guinea, the researchers shrugged off the discovery at the time, burying the find in a brief paragraph in a 130-something-page report. With no surveys since, the scientists who followed had lost track of exactly where the reefs might lie.…