Himalayan fossil hoax

The Himalayan fossil hoax, or simply the Himalayan hoax, or the case of the peripatetic fossils, 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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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" in the words of the Indian magazine Down to Earth, or according to Talent, "the biggest paleontological fraud of all time"; with Gupta being named "the greatest fossil faker of all time", the "most notorious known paleontological fraudster", and "Houdini of the Himalayas."