Tidal tails are created in major mergers involving disk galaxies .
How the tidal tails trace the assembly history of massive galaxies remains to be explored .
We identify a sample of 461 merging galaxies with long tidal tails from 35 076 galaxies mass-complete at M _ { \star } \geq 10 ^ { 9.5 } M _ { \odot } and 0.2 \leq z \leq 1 based on HST /ACS F814W imaging data and public catalogs of the COSMOS field .
The long tails refer to these with length equal to or longer than the diameter of their host galaxies .
The mergers with tidal tails are selected using our novel A _ { O } - D _ { O } technique for strong asymmetric features together with visual examination .
Our results show that the fraction of tidal-tailed mergers evolves mildly with redshift , as \sim ( 1 + z ) ^ { 2.0 \pm 0.4 } , and becomes relatively higher in less massive galaxies out to z = 1 .
With a timescale of 0.5 Gyr for the tidal-tailed mergers , we obtain that the occurrence rate of such mergers follows 0.01 \pm 0.007 ( 1 + z ) ^ { 2.3 \pm 1.4 } Gyr ^ { -1 } and corresponds to \sim 0.3 events since z = 1 and roughly one-third of the total budget of major mergers from the literature .
For disk-involved major mergers , nearly half of them have undergone a phase with long tidal tails .