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."
In 1978, the American geologist Gilbert Klapper from the University of Iowa met Willi Ziegler at the University of Marburg in Germany to discuss the progress of research on extinct jawless vertebrates, the conodonts. At that time, Ziegler had Australian guests, John W. Pickett from the Geological Survey of New South Wales and his associate John Alfred Talent from Macquarie University in Sydney. Talent was by then an established expert in Devonian geology of Australian and Indian regions. As the leader of the research team of the first International Geological Correlation Programme, a project of UNESCO, Talent had explored the Himalayas in 1973−1977. Pickett and Talent shared their Himalayan studies and discussed Gupta's research on Devonian conodonts. They had also investigated 20 locations around Nepal, where Gupta had claimed many discoveries from Triassic, Permian, Carboniferous, and Devonian deposits (rocks ranging from around 420 to 299 million years old), and to their astonishment, found no fossils except one which was Silurian (around 443 to 420 Ma, therefore pre-Devonian). In one specific case, they explored the area where Gupta and William B. N. Berry (Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology) had reported in 1966 several fossils from Kashmir. They found that not only were the rocks incorrectly described, they were so deformed no fossil could have been present.
When Klapper and Ziegler learned of this, they looked into some of Gupta's papers and quickly noticed two photographs of the same conodont. Gupta's report indicated they were collected from sites several miles apart. They thought that it could be a case of accidental duplication of the same photograph. Real suspicion arose when they found the resemblance of Gupta's fossils with those collected by George Jennings Hinde from the Eighteen Mile Creek near Buffalo, New York, that had been presented before the Geological Society of London a century before, in 1876.
The first methodical and critical analysis of Gupta's research records was done by Prem N. Agarwal and S. N. Singh of the University of Lucknow. In 1980, Agarwal and Singh reviewed research development in the general palaeontology of the Himalayas in which they also examined Gupta's papers. First, they found the long list of conodonts described by Gupta in 1978 bore an uncanny resemblance to those in the doctoral thesis of Nand Lal Chhabra submitted to the University of Lucknow in 1977. They noted: "It is really a surprising coincidence, unless either of the authors has drawn upon the data of the other without proper reference or acknowledgement." Gupta's conodonts and their geological settings turned out to be a major issue. What Agarwal and Singh revealed next were the wildly improper descriptions of fossils and their locations in most of Gupta's papers; the same species reported in one paper was absent in another report of the same location. The reported information was so comprehensively chaotic and inconsistent that they concluded: "These anomalies in different papers by the same author/s is not understandable, unless they are serious printing mistakes."
Talent made another discovery in 1987 when he visited Paris. He went to Alain Carion's shop of minerals, fossils and meteorites, named the Carion Minéraux, on Île Saint-Louis. He purchased many fossils there including some extinct ammonoid cephalopods that came from a fossil site near Erfoud, Morocco. He quickly discerned that the Moroccan fossils were very similar to, if not identical, to Gupta's fossils from the Himalayas. Talent decided to compile the discrepancies found in Gupta's research. With his former student and associate Glenn Anthony Brock, he meticulously reanalysed Gupta's published works, establishing that there was not just one or a few errors, but that Gupta was a prolific fraudster; falsifying, recycling, and plagiarising research data in hundreds of publications. One notable observation by Brock was that Gupta had used images of fossils analyzed by British geologists in the early 20th century, explaining: "[And] all that Gupta had done was take some scissors and cut out the specimens, put them down on a new plate with a new number on them and claim them as his own – and these were samples from somewhere very different, from parts of Somalia."
In 1980, Gupta met Philippe Janvier at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and showed him "a magnificent fossil fish skull" which he brought along. Gupta had travelled to China, but claimed that he had collected the fossil from Zanskar, Ladakh, at the foothills of the Himalayas. Recognising the fossil as a new species, Janvier made the identification, and with Gupta submitted the discovery to the journal Recent Researches in Geology the next year. Shortly after this, Janvier went to Sweden where he met Zhang Miman (Meemann Chang), director of the Chinese Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, who was working on some fish fossils from China. Janvier immediately noticed that some of these fossils were exactly like the one he and Gupta had recently described. When inquired, Miman explained to him that the particular specimen was an extinct Devonian coelacanth species she named Youngolepis praecursor (formally reported by Miman in 1995) that was found in Yunnan and North Vietnam, and so common in those regions that the fossils were frequently used as gifts to visitors. Chang had already published the discovery in January 1981. Janvier told Gupta to hold their publication, but it was eventually published in 1982 with a few modifications based on Chang's paper. Uncomfortable with the purported origin of the "Himalayan" fossil, Janvier published a note of concern in Bulletin of the Indian Geologists Association, remarking that Chang's and Gupta's specimens were "strikingly similar." Although Gupta avowed that he had never been to the fossil site in China, it was known that he had had a trip to China just prior to going to France. Janvier was convinced that Gupta had fooled him: "Now, there is no evidence that Gupta brought the fish fossil with him from China, but I'm 99% sure he did."
The exposé
Calgary symposium