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A ghost lineage is a phylogenetic lineage that is inferred to exist but has no fossil record.
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Name
In 1992, an article stated: These additional entities are taxa [groups] that are predicted to occur by the internal branching structure of phylogenetic trees....I refer to these as ghost lineages because they are invisible to the fossil record. The author elaborated on its meaning in further articles.
Examples
When looking back at extinct organisms, there are some groups of organisms (or lineages) that have gaps in their fossil records. These organisms or species may be closely related to one another, but there are no traces in the fossil records or sediment beds that might shed some light on their origins. A classic example is the coelacanth, a type of fish related to the lungfishes and to primitive tetrapods. It seems that coelacanths have also been around for the past 80 million years, but have failed to leave us any fossils to look at. The reason for this is their environment, which is deep water near volcanic islands; therefore, these sediments are hard to get to, giving these coelacanths an 80 million year gap or ghost lineage. Another ghost lineage was that of the averostran theropods, a ghost lineage now reduced considerably thanks to the discovery of Tachiraptor.
Duration and diversification
It is possible that the gaps in one organism's evolution can help us identify events in the fossil record. This can be done by calculating an actual ghost lineage's duration through intervals of time. It shows how the ghost lineage duration will go down as diversity goes up, helping to better understand when and maybe why the gaps happened.