The Himalayan fossil hoax

The Himalayan fossil hoax, or simply the Himalayan hoax, or the case of the peripatetic fossils, was perpetrated by an Indian geologist Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University. Since his doctoral research in the early 1960s and the following two decades, Gupta worked on the geological and fossil studies of the Himalayan region, producing hundreds of research publications that were taken as fundamental to understanding the geology of the Himalayas. The Australian geologist John Talent of Macquarie University, who also worked on the geology of the Himalayas, found that Gupta's reports did not match those geological settings and the fossils were particularly odd, with some of them extraordinarily similar to those from other parts of the world. With Glenn Brock, Talent meticulously scrutinised Gupta's voluminous publications and revealed that Gupta had manipulated, faked, recycled, and plagiarised his data. Early in 1978, Gilbert Klapper and Willi Ziegler had suspected foul play when they noticed that Gupta's conodont fossils were similar to those collected by George Jennings Hinde from Buffalo, New York, a century before. As Arun Deep Ahluwalia recalled, Gupta had faked conodont fossils by planting them in the Himalayan rock samples to impress Kiril Budurov in 1980. Gupta duped Philippe Janvier into describing a fish fossil as a new species in 1982, which Janvier later found was collected from China. Talent also discovered in 1986 that Gupta used Moroccan fossils available in a Paris shop to report the presence of ammonoid fossils in the Himalayas. Brock's investigation showed that Gupta's earliest publications including his doctoral thesis indicated plagiarised fossil pictures directly clipped from the 20th-century monographs of Frederick Richard Cowper Reed. Talent publicly revealed Gupta's anomalous fossils and geological inconsistencies at the International Symposium on the Devonian System held at Calgary, Canada, in 1987. His documented criticism was published in German serial Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg the next year, but was not widely read. Dubbed the Himalayan peripatetic (misplaced) fossils, the case became global news in 1989 when Talent summarised the Courier story in Nature, with an associated journalistic investigation by Roger Lewin published in Science. It came to light that many of Gupta's Himalayan fossils were acquired from different parts of the world − some bought and some apparently stolen. Gupta had chosen "phantom localities" to attribute his fossil discoveries without ever visiting them. The University Grants Commission of India withdrew its funding to his research. Although suspended for 11 months, Panjab University continued his employment until his normal retirement in 2002. The case was described as "the biggest paleontological fraud of all time" by Talent and as the "greatest scientific fraud of the century" by the Indian magazine Down to Earth.