Elvis taxon


In paleontology, an Elvis taxon is a taxon that has been misidentified as having re-emerged in the fossil record after a period of presumed extinction, but is not actually a descendant of the original taxon, instead having developed a similar morphology by convergent evolution. This implies that the extinction of the original taxon is real, and one taxon containing specimens from before and after the extinction would be polyphyletic.

Etymology

The term "Elvis taxon" was coined by D. H. Erwin and M. L. Droser in a 1993 paper to distinguish descendant from non-descendant taxa:

Related but distinctive concepts

By contrast, a Lazarus taxon is one that really is a descendant of the original taxon, and highlights transitional fossil records, which might be found later.
A zombie taxon has been considered a Lazarus taxon because it has been collected from younger strata, but it later turns out to be a fossil that was freed from the original seam and was refossilized in a sediment of a younger age. An example is a trilobite that gets eroded out of its Cambrian-aged limestone matrix and reworked into Miocene-aged siltstone.

Examples