Over the last half century, the taxonomy and biogeography of reef corals has been heavily influenced by the idea that reticulate evolution and hybridisation are so prevalent that coral species cannot be robustly delimited. These assumptions have been used to justify the rampant synonymy of nominal species from different regions of the Indo-Pacific, and the underpinned the belief that corals exhibit far lower rates of endemism than coral reef fishes or other marine invertebrates. In recent years, advances in molecular phylogenomic methods for species delimitation have enabled quantitative tests of the taxonomy developed in the late 20th century. These analyses have consistently demonstrated that this taxonomy, which has underpinned coral reef science for the last 50 years, is fundamentally incongruent the evolutionary history and systematic relationships within the Scleractinia at all taxonomic levels. Moreover, integrated approaches combining morphological and molecular data regularly reveal morphological characters that are taxonomically informative at all taxonomic levels, indicating that many lineages labelled as 'cryptic species' are actually not. Rather, the morphological characters used to define species, genera and families under the previous taxonomy were plagued by convergence, leading to distantly related species being lumped together based on the basis of convergent morphological characters. Detailed re-examination of the type material combined with sequencing of topotype specimens has also revealed that a large proportion of the synonymies of the late 20th century are incorrect. While taxonomic changes are ongoing, particularly at the species level, it is clear that the hypothesis that reef corals have biological and biogeographical properties fundamentally different from other reef taxa is simply an artefact of an uninformative taxonomy. Instead, the biogeography of reef corals appears remarkably similar to coral reef fishes and other coral reef invertebrate groups. Consequently, it is time to let go of the zombie ideas that have underpinned coral reef science for the last fifty years and move towards a robust taxonomic scheme that is congruent with the evidence provided by integrative taxonomic analysis.