Do observations favour Galileon over quintessence?

We study the Galileon scalar field model arising as a decoupling limit of the Dvali-Gababdaze-Porrati (DGP) construction for the late time acceleration of the universe. The model has one extra Galileon correction term over and above the standard kinetic and potential energy terms for a canonical quintessence field. We aim to study whether the current observational data can distinguish between the Galileon and the quintessence field. Our study shows the remarkable result that for linear and ϕ2 potentials, the data prefers the Galileon model over quintessence with significant Bayesian evidence. It confirms that the observable universe indeed prefers the inclusion of higher derivative Galileon correction in the standard scalar field Lagrangian.