Himalayan fossil hoax

The Himalayan fossil hoax (also called the Himalayan hoax or the case of the peripatetic fossils) is a case of scientific misconduct perpetrated by Indian palaeontologist Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University. Since his doctoral research in the 1960s and the following two decades, Gupta worked on the geology and fossil record of the Himalayan region, producing hundreds of research publications that were taken as fundamentals to understanding the geological formation of the Himalayas. Australian geologist John Talent from Macquarie University followed Gupta's research and happened to visit the Himalayas where he found that Gupta's fossils did not match those geological settings and were odd — some being extraordinarily similar to fossils from other parts of the world. In 1987, in the presence of Gupta at a scientific conference in Canada, Talent publicly displayed that Gupta's fossils were identical to those found in Morocco. Talent and his student Glenn Brock reanalysed Gupta's research, bringing out systematic evidence that Gupta had manipulated, faked, recycled, and plagiarised his data. Early in 1978, Gilbert Klapper and Willi Ziegler had suspected foul play as they noticed that Gupta's conodont fossils were similar to those collected by George Jennings Hinde from Buffalo, New York, a century before. Gupta's colleague Arun Deep Ahluwalia recalled that Gupta planted conodont fossils in 1980 to convince K. J. Budurov of the existence of the specimens in the Himalayas. Gupta duped Philippe Janvier into describing a fish fossil as a new species in 1981, which Janvier later found to have come from China. Talent also discovered in 1986 that Gupta likely used Moroccan fossils available in a Paris shop to report the presence of cephalopod fossils (ammonoids) in the Himalayas. Brock's investigation showed that Gupta's earliest publications starting from his doctoral thesis had evidence of plagiarism of fossil pictures directly clipped from the monographs of Frederick Richard Cowper Reed early in the 20th century. Talent publicly revealed Gupta's misconduct at the International Symposium on the Devonian System held at Calgary, Canada, in 1987. His systematic criticism was published in the 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 published the summarised story from Courier in Nature, with journalistic investigation by Roger Lewin published in Science. It came to light that Gupta's Himalayan fossils were mostly collected from different parts of the world. He had chosen "phantom localities" to attribute his fossil discoveries without ever visiting them. The University Grants Commission of India immediately withdrew its funding to Gupta. Although Panjab University suspended him for 11 months, it permitted him to continue service until his normal retirement in 2002. The case became the "greatest scientific fraud of the century" in the words of the Indian magazine Down to Earth, or according to Talent, "the biggest paleontological fraud of all time". Gupta was named "the greatest fossil faker of all time", the "most notorious known paleontological fraudster", and "Houdini of the Himalayas."

Background Vishwa Jit Gupta worked for his Ph.D. under the supervision of Mulk Raj Sahni at Panjab University in Chandigarh. Focussing on the palaeontology and geological features of the Himalayas, he started his main research and field work in 1963. He and Sahni reported the initial findings in five research papers in 1964, − a discovery of graptolites in two papers in Nature, a fossil assemblage in two papers in Current Science, and one in the Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India. His doctoral thesis was entitled Palaeontology, Stratigraphy and Structure of the Palaeozoic Rocks of the Area South-East of Srinagar upon which he received his degree in 1966. Over 25 years, Gupta published at least 458 research articles and five books. His publications were recognised as standard references on the geology and fossil record of the Himalayan region. As an honour, the Panjab University awarded him a D.Sc. and in 1972 created him a separate chair, Director of the Institute of Paleontology. Technical incongruities in Gupta's research were first pointed out by Sampige Venkateshaiya Srikantia, Om Narain Bhargava and Hari Mohan Kapoor of the Geological Survey of India. In 1978, Srikantia's team described the presence of bivalve mollusc fossils (Eurydesma cordatum and Deltopecten mitchelli) from Lahaul Valley, Himachal Pradesh, following a scientific exploration of the Himalayas. They came across the accounts of Gupta on the identification of Eurydesma at two locations in the Himalayas. In 1970 Gupta had reported finding the fossils in Lachulung La, identifying the deposits as Permian (Cisuralian, around 298-272 million years old) limestone. In 1973, he again described the same specimens from the Malung shale of Lahaul Valley in his book Indian Palaeozoic Stratigraphy. Here, Gupta assigned the fossils to a much younger Upper Permian (Lopingian, around 259-251 Ma). Srikantia's team noticed not only that Gupta's bivalves could not have existed in such different ages, but also found critical errors. They determined that Lachulung La was of a much younger series, the Triassic-Jurassic (250-145 Ma); Malung shale was already known to be of Upper Triassic (208-201 Ma). Their report ends with a cautionary statement: "the sequence built up by Gupta in the Sarchu area cannot be used for any stratigraphic work."

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