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The Himalayan fossil hoax,[1] or simply the Himalayan hoax,[2] or technically the peripatetic fossils,[3] is a case of scientific misconduct perpetrated by an Indian palaeontologist Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University. Since his doctoral research in the 1960s and following the next 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.[4] Australian geologist, John Talent from Macquarie University, had followed Gupta's research and happened to visit the Himalayas where he found that Gupta's fossils did not match the geological settings there and the fossils were particularly odd, with some of them extraordinarily similar to those 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 made systematic reanalysis of Gupta's research bringing out the evidence that Gupta had manipulated, faked, recycled and plagiarised his data.[5]

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 conodonts 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 new species in 1981, which Janvier later found to be coming from China. Talent also discovered in 1986 that Gupta likely used Moroccan fossils available in a Paris shop to report the presence of snail 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 pictured 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 German serial Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg the next year, but was not widely read. Dubbed the Himalayan peripatetic (misplaced) fossils, the case became a 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.[6] The University Grants Commission of India immediately withdrew its funding to Gupta. Although suspended for 11 months, Panjab University permitted him continued service until his normal retirement in 2002. The case became the "greatest scientific fraud of the century" by the Indian magazine Down to Earth,[7] or according to Talent, "the biggest paleontological fraud of all time";[8] with Gupta being named "the greatest fossil faker of all time",[9] the "most notorious known paleontological fraudster",[10] and "Houdini of the Himalayas."[11]

Background

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Vishwa Jit Gupta worked for his Ph.D. degree 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,[12][13] a fossil assemblage in two papers in Current Science,[14][15] and one in the Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India.[16] 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.[17]

Over 25 years, Gupta published over 458 research articles and five books.[18] His publications were recognised as standard references on the geology and fossil record of the Himalayan region.[19][20] 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.[18]

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.[21][22] In 1978, Srikantia's team described the presence of bivalve mollusk 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 to 272 million years old) limestone.[23] In 1973, he again described the same specimens from the Malung shale of Lahaul Valley in his book Indian Palaeozoic Stratigraphy.[24] Here, Gupta assigned the fossils to a much younger Upper Permian (Lopingian, around 259 to 251 million years old). 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 to 145 million years old); Malung shale was already known to be of Upper Triassic (208 to 201 million years old). Their report ends with a cautionary statement: "the sequence built up by Gupta in the Sarchu area cannot be used for any stratigraphic work."[25]

John Alfred Talent at age 72

In 1978, 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.[26] At that time, Ziegler had Australian guests, John W. Pickett from the Geological Survey of New South Wales and his associate John A. Talent from Macquarie University in Sydney.[26] Talent by then was an established expert in Devonian geology of Australian and Indian regions.[27][28][29] As the leader of the research team of the first International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP-1), a project of UNESCO, Talent had explored the Himalayas during 1973−1977.[30][31][32] Pickett and Talent shared their Himalayan studies and discussed Gupta's research on Devonian conodonts. They had also investigated 20 locations around Nepal,[33] where Gupta had claimed many discoveries from Triassic, Permian and Carboniferous (around 359 to 299 million years old) and Devonian (around 420 to 360 million years old) deposits,[34][35][36][37] and to their astonishment, found not a trace of fossils, except one which belonged to Silurian (around 443 to 420 million years ago) and not Devonian.[9] In one specific case, they explored the area where Gupta and William B. N. Berry (Director of the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology) had reported in 1966 several fossils from Kashmir.[33] They found that not only the rocks were wrongly identified, but were so deformed that no fossil could have been present.[26]

Conodonts from Eighteen Mile Creek. Numbers 7 and 10 were reported by G. J. Hinde.

When Klapper and Ziegler learned of this, they looked into some of Gupta's papers and quickly noticed in two photographs of the same conodont fossil. Gupta's report indicated they were collected from sites several miles apart. They thought that it could be acase of accidental duplication of the same photograph.[38] The 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,[39] that had been presented before the Geological Society of London a century before, in 1876.[40] Gupta had sought for collaboration with both Klapper and Ziegler at different times, but they declined due to their concern about the suspicious incidents.

The first methodical and critical analysis of Gupta's research records were done by Prem N. Agarwal and S. N. Singh of Lucknow University. In 1980, Agarwal and Singh reviewed research development in the general palaeontology of the Himalayas in which they also examined Gupta's papers.[41] First, they found the long list of conodonts described by Gupta in 1978[42] that bears uncanny resemblance to those in the doctoral thesis of Nand Lal Chhabra submiited 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."[41] Gupta's conodonts and their geological settings turned out to be a major issue.[43] What Agarwal and Singh revealed next was the utterly messed up fossils with their locations in most of Gupta's papers; the same species found in the same location reported in one paper were absent in another report. The overall information was so 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."[41]

Talent made another discovery in 1987 when he visited Paris.[26] He went to Alain Carion's shop of minerals, fossils and meteorite, named the Carion Minéraux on Île Saint-Louis.[44] He purchased many fossils there including some extinct snails, the ammonoids, that came from a fossil site near Erfoud, Morocco. The Moroccan fossils, as he soon discerned, were very similar to, indeed identical to Gupta's fossils from the Himalayas. It was from then that Talent decided to compile the accumulating record of discordance in Gupta's research.[26] With his former student and associate Glenn Anthony Brock, he meticulously reanalysed Gupta's published works, establishing that the artifice was not just one or few incidences but that Gupta was a prolific fraudster, faking, recycling and plagiarising research data in hundreds of publications.[45][46] One prominent observation by Brock was that Gupta had used fossil images from 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."[5]

Youngolepis praecursor, a fish fossil from Yunnan, China, which Gupta claimed also present in the Himalayas.

In 1980, Gupta met Philippe Janvier at the Museum of Natural History at Paris[47] and showed him "a magnificent fossil fish skull" which he brought along.[26] Gutpa just had a trip to China, but claimed that he collected the fossil from Zanskar, Ladakh, at the foothills of Himalayas. Recognising the fossil as a new species, Janvier made the identification and with Gupta submitted the discovery in Recent Researches in Geology the next year.[48] Shortly after, 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 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[47] (formally reported by Miman in 1995[49]) that was found in Yunnan region and North Vietnam, and so common in those regions that the fossils were frequently used as gifts to visitors.[26] Chang had already published the discovery in January 1981.[50] Janvier told Gupta to hold their publication, but eventually got it published in 1982 with a few modifications based on Chang's paper.[51][52] With an unsettled mind on the origin of the Himalayan fossil, Janvier reported a note of concern in Bulletin of the Indian Geologists Association[53] remarking that Chang's and Gupta's specimens were "strikingly similar."[47] Although Gupta avowed that he had never been to the fossil site in China,[52] it was known that he had a trip to China just before 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."[26]

The exposé

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Calgary symposium

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Genuine ammonoid fossil, Ophiceras sakuntala, from the Himalayas.

Gupta's fakery was first publicly exposed at the International Symposium on the Devonian System held at Calgary, Canada, during 17-20 August 1987.[54] A week before, Talent came across a paper by Gupta and German palaeontologist Heinrich Karl Erben (Institut für Paläontologie, Bonn) published in Paläontologische Zeitschrift in 1983 reporting a series of Devonian ammonoids from Himachal Pradesh.[55] When Talent presented his own research, he added a discussion on the Himalayan fossils and those from Morocco displaying them side by side on the screen,[5] which appeared "exactly the same".[56] Another case was Gupta's reports of two conodonts in 1975, reported from two sites 600 kilometres apart in two research papers, but the fossils were the same.[26] One scientist pointed to Gupta, sitting on the front row, asking: "Well, how do you explain having exactly the same fossils in two localities 600 kilometres apart?" Infuriated Gupta rushed out of the room and re-entered clenching his fist trying to punch Talent, but was prevented by other participants. He shouted to the organisers demanding the list of all participants and Talent's manuscript.[56]

The committee of the Calgary symposium informed the Vice Chancellor of Panjab University of the issues they observed on Gupta's conduct and research, but no action appeared to be taken.[38] In spite of the public exposition, only fossil experts at the symposium knew of the case, and Gupta continued to publish several research papers.[26]

Courier publication

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The director of Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, who was at the Calgary symposium asked Talent for publication of his presentation. Talent willingly gave it[56] and was published in the serial Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg as a 50-page article "Silurian and Devonian of India, Nepal and Bhutan: Biostratigraphic and Palaeobiogeographic Anomalies" in 1988. Picket with Rajendra Kumar Goel and Arvind Kumar Jain of the University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee, India) co-authored the paper.[57] The publication exposed over a hundred fossil frauds in Gupta's research from five books and 458 articles, published with 128 co-authors during 28 years.[18] However, Courier had a limited circulation and the news was not widely read.[26]

Publications in Nature and Science

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The case became global news when Nature picked up the Courier article and commissioned Talent to publish a three-page commentary. Talent provided reasons to suspect that Gupta's fossils were bought, stolen or received as gifts from various parts of the world, and not authentically collected from the Himalayan region,[56] and that Gupta's research was a "quagmire of palaeontological disinformation."[5] Published on 20 April 1989 issue, Talent's headline in Nature runs "The case of the peripatetic fossils".[3] It immediately prompted media investigations.[26] Talent wrote the conclusion:

Rhinos in Rio? Kangaroos in Kashmir? Well, something as remarkable biogeographically is said to have occurred. At first sight it might appear that a whole circus of exotica – mainly invertebrate – was let loose and fossilized seriatim in the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic sequences of the Himalayas. Earth scientists in general, and palaeontologists in particular, have blissfully assumed that, apart from the Piltdown Man, their science was largely free from attempts to pollute the literature. There have been cases of practical jokes, and examples of misappropriation of materials by individuals over-eager to publish. But compared with the cornucopia of items disgorged into the stratigraphy of the Himalayan region over the past 25 years, such instances are mere bagatelles.[3]

As Science learned the news, its news editor Roger Lewin made journalistic investigation contacting the scientists involved. Lewin published his report on 21 April 1989, and in it Talent drew a remark and suggestion:

The database for the Silurian and Devonian of the Himalaya has become so extensively marred by error, inconsistency and implausibility as to throw grave doubts on the scientific validity of any conclusions that might be drawn from it. An appropriate way to approach this problem and clarify many of the questions raised would be through an independent fact-finding commission set up to probe most of the legions of paleontologically anomalous and suspect reports.[26]

The report in Science made the case global news.[9]

The fossils

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Conodonts

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One of the principal fossils of dispute was those of conodonts that lived from the Cambrian to the Early Jurassic (around 500 to 200 million years ago).[58] One of the first and best understood conodont fossils were from the Amsdell Creek in New York, USA, belonging to Devonian (around 420 to 360 million years old).[59] Gupta, with help of English geologists Frank H. T. Rhodes and R. L. Austin, reported a discovery titled "Devonian Conodonts from Kashmir" in Nature in 1967, the first of such report from India,[60] and continued to discover many conodonts in and around Kashmir.[61][62] According to Talent, ''it is statistically beyond the bounds of possibility'' that Devonian conodonts were present in the Himalayas, and that Gupta's specimens were from the Amsdell Creek.[8] Klapper also agreed, saying, "[It] is impossible to be 100% certain that the conodonts Gupta reports on come from New York and not the Himalayas as he claims, but I am as certain as I can be."[26]

Webster, Carl B. Rexroad and Talent published "An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta conodont papers" in 1993 based on investigation from 19 of Gupta's collaborators. They found that Gupta's conodont reports were recycled in 15 publications.[63]

Ammonoids

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Other anomalous fossils are those of extinct cephalopods, the ammonoids. Talent was convinced that Gupta's ammonoid specimens were directly from a fossil site near Erfoud, Morocco. The characteristic features showed they were identical. Talent had come across the Moroccan ammonoids at the fossil shop in Paris and noticed that they exactly matched the images Gupta used in publications.[8] Talent also discovered that Gupta had claimed that both conodonts and ammonoids came from the same rock strata, and could not have been the case since the two group of animals live 15 million years apart.[8] By May 1989, Gupta insistently wrote Erben that the fossils were truly of Himalayas, but Erben was inclined to make a statement in Paläontologische Zeitschrift defending his position, stating: "Whatever the truth in this highly detestable affair may be, my personal responsibility in the paper under discussion has been, and still is, restricted to its taxonomical and morphological parts as well as to the illustrations."[64]

Webster published "An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta echinoderm papers, 1971–1989" in 1991 and "leaves no doubt that these fraudulent practices were knowingly continued over the past 25 years." He found 28 of Gupta's papers containing dubious information on the fossil discoveries.[65]

Gupta's strategy

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Gupta was careful in his research publications and would ask for eminent scientists to collaborate, he would provide the basic geological details and his collaborators, the fossil identification.[8] As in the case of his first major publication in Nature in 1967, he was able to convince Rhodes from the University College of Swansea (later president of Cornell University) and Austin from the University of Southampton.[60] Gary Webster at Washington State University had coauthored nine of Gupta's papers and asserted that his identification of the crinoid fossils were genuine, but later conceded that he was "virtually certain" they were obtained from places other than the Himalayas. He declared that Gupta "willfully tried to dupe the scientific community.''[8]

One major outline of Gupta's reports were that he made the locations of the fossils vague so that it would be difficult for peers to vindicate or refute the findings.[20] When other scientists investigated, they never found the exact location or the fossils in the area from where they were allegedly collected.[66] Gupta had explained that the Indian Government restricted the use of detailed topographic or army maps for strategic reasons concerning the Himalayas.[20]

Gupta's 1966 thesis contained fossil images from the 1908[67] and 1912[68] reports of Frederick Richard Cowper Reed, a British geologist who surveyed the Himalayan and Burma regions. The same images were used in two of Gupta's papers published in Panjab University Research Bulletin, in volumes 20 and 21. Gupta's conodont fossils most likely came from the Amsdell Creek specimens at the Aberystwyth University in Wales where he had done research work.[18][69] In 1992, researchers at the Aberystwyth University confided to Nature that Gupta's fossils were identical to those missing from their collection.[70]

In a Nature commentary, Arun Deep Ahluwalia, Gupta's colleague and co-author in several papers,[71][72][73] revealed that during the visit of their collaborator K. J. Budurov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to the Panjab University in 1980, Gupta apparently planted fossils in the samples. As Budurov was prepared to examine the tiny fossils, Gupta insisted that he allow the samples to settle down. Ahluwalia recollected that he had not seen the fossils from that particular sample earlier, but as Gupta "prepared" it, numerous conodonts were visible. Ahluwalia did not suspect any foul play but was "rather embarrassed at having initially missed the assemblage, but was happy at the 'discovery',"[74] which the three of them published in two papers in 1982.[71][73] Following Talent's suspicion, Ahluwalia processed the original limestone sample and could not find any fossils. He also cited several instances of fossils collected and reported from sites where Gupta apparently did not explore.[74]

Another colleague, Shashi Bhushan Bhatia recalled his suspicion when Gupta told him that the rock samples from Kurig were of Devonian, but Bhatia's later exploration of the same site gave much younger geological age, Permo-Carboniferous.[20] Bhatia could not remember an instance of Gupta visiting Kurig, but he gave ostracode fossils to Bhatia which he claimed were from Devonian sediments of Kurig. In 1972, as Gupta requested, Bhatia took the samples to British Museum of Natural History in London. There Bhatia analysed the specimens and found that they were the same as those from Haragan Formation in Oklahoma.[75] In good faith, he, Jain and Gupta reported the discovery in 1982.[76] When the controversy broke out in 1989, Bhatia consulted Robert Folke Lundin at Arizona State University, who confirmed that the Himalayan ostracodes were similar to American specimens.[75] On the same topic, a collaborator, Udai K. Bassi of the Geological Survey of India, later verified that Kurig does not have Devonian deposits but only of Carboniferous (younger rock formations),[77] and that border and village records did not have any mention of Gupta visiting the site.[20]

Reactions

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Talent expressed that Gupta "inundated geological and biogeographical literature of the Himalayas with a blizzard of disinformation so extensive as to render the literature almost useless."[78] Gupta said to The New York Times that he had invited Talent to Panjab University and the Himalayan sites to verify the research findings following the Calgary incident,[79] but he had declined.[8] In trying to belittle the accusations, he said that the dispute was "minor disagreements over taxonomy among experts."[6] He defended by claiming Talent's allegations as "'malicious bias and professional jealousy'' based on lies that were "building up a story without any basis.'' He added, ''We've had differences for the past 20 years, and he's trying to cash in on them.'' Talent admitted that he did decline Gupta's invitation as it was more appropriate for independent investigations from other scientists.[8]

In the Science report, Webster, one of Gupta's most prolific co-authors, admitted that he already knew that the Himalayan fossils were very similar to those in America and Europe, especially the Crinoids which were found only in the United States. Commenting on Talent's Calgary speech, he conceded: "I am now virtually certain that most of these specimens did come from places other than the Himalayas. I certainly should have been more wary."[26] Another collaborator, Philippe Janvier of the Museum of Natural History at Paris said that he had asked Gupta for site expedition where the fossils were collected, to which Gupta replied that it was not possible due to political reasons. In his commentary "Breakdown of trust" in Nature, lamented on the lack of awareness on scientific frauds and wrote: "The Gupta case may just be a 'big noise'."[47]

Erben responded to Lewin's report claiming his innocence, while admitting that Talent could be right but blaming him for trusting a Paris shopkeeper while he himself trusted Gupta, a qualified scientist. He remarked: "However, while really cogent evidence is, indeed, lacking, the circumstantial evidence assembled by Talent seems to be rather convincing."[80] Talent replied blaming Erben of ignoring or not being aware of a series of fossils Gupta produced and trying to downplay the fraud allegations. He mentioned that the Morroccon-type ammonoids were available in large supplies not only in Paris, but also in Sydney, Australia, to which Erben could have investigated.[81]

Writing in Nature, Gupta made the only defensive and explanatory response in September 1989. He explained that most of his explorations were done with other researchers and was not alone in visiting the allegedly dubious sites. Referring to the Devonian fish which he described with Janvier in 1981, he asserted that he had never met Miman or visited her institute so that the specimen as a gift was a misinformation.[79] However, he made a misinterpretation of Lewin's report which simply mentioned that the fossils were abundant in China and North Vietnam and were given off as gifts.[26] He made a closing remark: "

John Talent has made sweeping pronouncements on Himalayan geology. Yet he is not an authority on the subject. I can only conclude that his attack on me was made for two reasons – to draw attention to himself and to deflect criticism of his own failure to contribute to Himalayan geology.[79]

Subhay Kumar Prasad, then director of Gupta's department, defended him saying that Talent's accusation was "a conspiracy to denigrate a top Indian scientist".[82] On the other hand, Ahluwalia affirmed that the fossils were recycled with their localities made up, commenting that "most of the doubts expressed by Talent are well-founded" and that it was a "great embarrassment" that compelled him to retract the published reports which he co-authored.[74] The editor of Nature found Gupta's commentary unimpressive, noting that "close readings of the accusations and responses leaves the impression that Gupta's defence is flimsy."[83]

The only scientist to stand up for Gupta was a collaborator, John Bruce Waterhouse of the University of Queensland. Waterhouse stood by that Gupta's specimens were definitely collected from the Himalayas.[83] He asserted that the Himalayan research were reported with accurate locations, had verified the fossils, explored the fossil sites, and criticised Talent for never examining first-hand the actual fossils and Ahluwalia for misrepresenting some of the reports. Commenting in Nature, he wrote: "The 'case' against Gupta is remarkably rich in bold metaphors and unproven assertions, and somewhat thin in scientific analysis."[11]

Panjab University issued a circular in 1990 that "it is interested not in brushing the controversy under the carpet, but arriving at the truth." It sought help from major authorities including the University Grants Commission, Indian Council of Medical Research, Indian National Science Academy, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Department of Science and Technology, and Geological Survey of India.[84] Then in March that year, the university took a controversial decision by instituting a scientific expedition team,[83] to be led by Gupta. The Geological Society of India was disappointed by the proposal, commenting: "We fail to understand why Gupta should have been asked to lead the expedition. Besides, it is beyond our comprehension as to how allegations of recycling can be proved or disproved in the field."[85]

The Geological Society of India and the Society for Scientific Values independently investigated the case and submitted their reports to Panjab University in December 1990. In February 1991, the university accepted the allegations and Gupta was momentarily suspended from service in February 1991. The report of the Society for Scientific Values was kept confidential.[86][a] The Indian National Science Academy also conducted an independent investigation but failed to come up with coherent findings.[87]

Geological Society of India

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The Geological Society of India, which claimed that it normally avoids controversial matters for publications in its Journal of the Geological Society of India, fearing that "the accusations [against Gupta] could be construed as quiescence" was obliged to publish two articles from Talent further damning the research malpractices of Gupta.[6] In the first paper published in June 1989, Talent's team gave an elaboration of instances of plagiarism in the reports of Gupta.[46] The other published in December 1989 presented further cases of fossil recycling and mismatching of the fossil sources.[45]

As Ian Anderson reported in New Scientist, the Geological Society of India made a "controversial move" by issuing an expression of concern, but no retraction.[88] The society reassessed Gupta's papers and found "several discrepancies lending support to the accusations levelled against V. J. Gupta" in 19 publications.[66] The GSI scientists visited seven localities in the Himalayas from where Gupta claimed to have collected Devonian fossils, but found no such evidence,[18] declaring "the falsification of facts attempted by Gupta."[89] They requested Gupta for access to his specimen collections for verification, but never received any response.[86][90] The report titled "The Himalayan Fossil Controversy" was publicised on 1 January 1991, condemned Gupta's research as "fictitious and based on spurious fossil."[86] It ran the pronouncements:[66]

  • The most glaring deficiency noticed in nearly all the papers is the absence of precise locality information. Subsequent field checks by officers of the Geological Survey of India and some of Gupta's own colleagues have failed to reveal not only the fossils, but also rock formations stated to have been present in the area... He [Gupta] has failed to produce the originals of the recycled fossils with their registration number, date of collection, field description as entered in Field Note Books and Laboratory Registers and such other evidences which could confirm the genuineness of his fossil collections.
  • It is obvious from the volume of evidence that has now been collected that the fossil finds of V. J. Gupta. are not reliable, that there are internal inconsistencies, that the data is incomplete bordering on disinformation.
  • The Society has no other alternative but to publish the evaluation report with the recommendation that the incomplete and doubtful fossil records as published in the Journal and listed in the enclosed report be ignored till such time that independent proof is forthcoming of the in situ existence of the fossils [emphasis in original].

Consequences

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Gupta was suspended by Panjab University in February 1991.[86] As T.N. Kapoor became the Vice Chancellor of the university, he reinstated Gupta in January 1992.[91] As soon as the controversy was publicised, the University Grants Commission of India stopped its funding to Gupta's department.[92] In 1993, the UGC rescinded Gupta's department from the status of the Centre of Advanced Study in Palaeontology and Himalayan Geology.[93] The affair was investigated in a court case led by M. S. Gujral, a retired Chief Justice of the Sikkim High Court.[7][94] The inquiry lasted the next two years, with the final report submitted in April 1994. The verdict was guilty in all charges such as data recycling, plagiarism, concocting research locations and conning other scientists.[18] Punjab University stayed his becoming a dean which was due that year.[7]

Gupta's dismissal from the Punjab University was discussed by the Syndicate meeting on 30 June 1994, but no decision was made and the case was deferred to the Senate. The Senate meeting on 24 September made a majority decision, five out of 55, that Gupta should not be discharged.[18] Gupta was restricted from teaching palaeontology,[94] but was assigned a course in engineering and ground water geology,[56] while continuing to supervise Ph.D. students.[89] He was given an early retirement,[5] but with full pension benefits in 2002.[78][b]

Gupta gave death threats to Talent.[5] Talent sarcastically revealed in an ABC News interview when asked if he was a hero: "Oh, I don't know about a hero. There were no particularly dire consequences, just a few death threats. The people who were hurt most were in India."[56] One day, Gupta's technical assistant announced that he had evidence of the sources of fossil frauds and was planning to reveal them; he was killed in a hit-and-run accident the following night.[5] Gupta also put a price to whoever would make physical assaults on the co-authors of the Courier paper, Goel and Kumar. A few days later, the mother of one of them [not specified] met a hit-and-run accident, had both legs and both arms with several ribs broken, and became permanently disabled.[56]

Impact

[edit]

Gupta's forgery was often compared with the case of Piltdown Man, sometimes remarked as the greatest hoax in science.[95] Nature announced Talent's observations with a statement that it "will cast a longer shadow" than the Piltdown Man because of its elaborate publications involving numerous discoveries through a quarter of a century, fossils and scientists.[2] The Chicago Tribune conveyed the news as "the most serious case of its kind since the Piltdown hoax."[96] The New York Times further explained: "Unlike the case of Piltdown man, in which a single skull was passed off as a fossil of a prehistoric human, this one involves a much broader range of reported finds that have become a part of scientific literature."[8] Talent described the meaning and consequences of Gupta's research as proving the kangaroos as natives to Kashmir or rhinoceros to Rio. Given the scale of fossils and the research publications, he described it as "[perhaps] the biggest paleontological fraud of all time."[8] In 1994, Down to Earth reported it as the "greatest scientific fraud of the century".[7] According to Tony Mayer of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, the saga "is possibly one of the most extensive instances of malpractice in the whole scientific record."[94]

Gupta never faced criminal or immoral charges from the university or government authorities. There was an alleged cover-up of the saga by the government.[1][5] Pushpa Mittra Bhargava, founder-director of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, explained the reason of his resignation from India's largest scientific establishments including Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, and Indian Social Science Academy, citing Gupta's case: "Charges of fraudulent claims laid by him [Gupta] on the discovery of Himalayan fossils have been proved, but the only punishment he has been awarded is the stoppage of some of his increments. What is worse is that the person who exposed him is now being harassed and victimised instead of being made a hero."[97]

Gujral's inquiry reported that none of Gupta's co-authors were associated with the misconduct. A colleague and co-author of Gupta, Ahluwalia who had openly supported Talent's allegations and blamed Gupta of misconduct into which he was linked,[20][93] was reprimanded and punished by the Panjab University. The Geological Society of India's secretary Sampige Venkateshaiya Srikantia made a press statement criticising the Punjab University's decision in 1994 as "a mild censure which amounts to a blatant disregard of ethical values... [and] chosen to ignore all the scientific and legal opinions... [referring to Ahluwalia's case] no one with conscience will come forward to speak the truth and the scientific community will be anaesthetized."[89] Nature commented on the failure of Panjab University on the case: "Chandigarh's indulgence of Gupta is a kind of rope trick in that it defies the admittedly unwritten laws that usually apply when people are accused of publishing fraudulent data."[70]

Gupta's case had lingering effect on Indian palaeontology, and the controversy was blamed as the reason "paleontology lost prestige" in India[78] and caused "irreparable damage to Indian science."[98] Indian discoveries on fossils were seen with suspicion. An example of such prejudice was the discovery of one of the oldest multicellular eukaryotes.[99] The fossils were discovered from the Vindhyan Mountains in Central India by Rafat Jamal Azmi at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Dehradun, who reported in the Journal of the Geological Society of India in 1998.[100] Azmi announced the discovery in Science[101] and was immediately received with scepticism. When renowned palaeontologists including Nicholas Butterfield, Simon Conway Morris and Soren Jensen (all at the University of Cambridge) examined the samples, they concluded that they were not fossils at all but artifacts.[100] The Geological Society of India conducted an expedition to verify the discovery, and found no evidence of Azmi's claims. In 2000, they issued a statement declaring: "the identification of fossils by R. J. Azmi is far from convincing, and that more detailed work [would be] necessary before the authenticity of the find is accepted."[102] It became a lingering controversy until it was resolved in 2009 when Stefan Bengtson and his team at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm published the full analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.[103] Azmi's discovery became accepted as genuine.[104] In a further analysis published in PLoS Biology in 2017, Bengston's team established that the fossil was that of an alga, which they named Rafatazmia chitrakootensis after the discoverer, and was 1.6 billion years old,[105] becoming the oldest known alga.[106]

[edit]

In 1989, the US House of Representatives used the case as one of the evidences of scientific frauds in its first hearing on its policy on "Maintaining the Integrity of Scientific Research".[107]

In 1991, a 52-minute documentary of the hoax was presented by Robyn Williams in an ABC TV programme The Professor's New Clothes.[108]

In 2000, a 24-minute podcast documentary was broadcast on 31 March by BBC in its programme "Science Friction" with the headline "Tampering with the Fossil Record".[109]

In 2013, S.K. Shah of the Palaeontological Society of India published a book Himalayan Fossil Fraud: A View from the Galleries.[110]

Footnote

[edit]
  1. ^ Jayaraman mistook Geological Survey of India for Geological Society of India.
  2. ^ Sources, even from Talent, indicate the retirement in 2004 which may not be reliable, and obviously not an "early" retirement.[5][56]

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