Himalayan fossil hoax

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. 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." investigated Gupta's fraud. 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. 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 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, and to their astonishment, found no fossils except one which was Silurian (around 443 to 420 Ma, therefore pre-Devonian). They found that not only were the rocks incorrectly described, they were so deformed no fossil could have been present. that had been presented before the Geological Society of London a century before, in 1876. Gupta had sought for collaboration with both Klapper and Ziegler at different times, but they had declined due to their concern about the suspicious incidents. 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." 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." 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. and showed him "a magnificent fossil fish skull" which he brought along. 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 that was found in Yunnan and North Vietnam, and so common in those regions that the fossils were frequently used as gifts to visitors. 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 '', from the Himalayas. Gupta's practice of forgery was first publicly exposed at the International Symposium on the Devonian System held at Calgary, Canada, from 17 to 20 August 1987. Gupta and German palaeontologist Heinrich Karl Erben (Institut für Paläontologie, Bonn) had published in Paläontologische Zeitschrift in 1983 reporting a series of Devonian ammonoids from Himachal Pradesh. When Talent presented his own research, he added a discussion on the Himalayan fossils, including Gupta's ammonoids and those from Morocco, displaying them side by side on the screen; Another case of identical fossils presented by Talent was from Gupta's reports of two conodonts in 1975, allegedly collected from two sites apart and described in two different papers. The document exposed over a hundred fossil frauds in Gupta's research, involving five books and 458 articles, published with 128 co-authors over a period of 28 years. It was these reports that brought the case to an international level. == The fossils ==

Conodonts The principal fossils of dispute were the conodonts. One of the first and best-understood conodont fossils was from Amsdell Creek in New York, USA, which was determined as Devonian in age. With the help of the English geologists Frank H. T. Rhodes and R. L. Austin, Gupta reported a discovery titled "Devonian Conodonts from Kashmir" in Nature in 1967, the first conodont report from India, According to Talent, "it is statistically beyond the bounds of possibility" that Devonian conodonts were present in the Himalayas, and that Gupta's specimens probably were those of the Amsdell Creek. Ammonoids Talent was convinced that Gupta's ammonoid specimens originally came from a fossil site near Erfoud, Morocco. The characteristic features showed their identity. Talent had come across the same Moroccan ammonoids at the fossil shop in Paris and noticed that they exactly matched the images Gupta had used in publications. Webster published "An evaluation of the V. J. Gupta echinoderm papers, 1971–1989" in 1991 and asserted that the observation "leaves no doubt that these fraudulent practices were knowingly continued over the past 25 years." He found that 28 of Gupta's papers contained dubious information on the fossil discoveries. == Gupta's strategy ==

Gupta was careful in his research publications, asking eminent scientists to collaborate. He provided the fossils and the basic geological details, and allowed his collaborators to make the fossil identification, so that they became "unsuspecting partners in crime", as Bhargava lamented, or unwitting "partners in the deception", according to Bangalore Puttaiya Radhakrishna, editor of the Journal of the Geological Society of India. Michael E. Brookfield of the University of Guelph in Ontario, J. B. Waterhouse of the University of Queensland, and many others. Gupta's most prolific foreign collaborator was Waterhouse who co-authored 19 research papers, followed by Webster with nine papers. In another case, Gupta investigated the lower Phuchauki in Nepal with Vinod Singh Chhetri from the Department of Mines and Geology, Kathmandu, in 1974. He published four solo papers between 1975 and 1976 including three on conodont finds. In 1977, he published a geological study in Chayanica Geologica with Chhetri's name on it but without the latter's knowledge or consent. When Chhetri came to know of the publication, he requested Gupta for the data and fossil specimens so that he could confirm them; he never got a response. Chhetri affirmed that Gupta never explored Nepal other than Phuchauki (not even the upper area, contrary to Gupta's report), and never collected any fossil of interest. Gupta was an unapologetic plagiarist and thief. His 1966 thesis contained fossil images from the 1908 and 1912 reports of Frederick Richard Cowper Reed, a British geologist who had 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 Aberystwyth University in Wales where he had done research work. In 1992, researchers at the Aberystwyth University confided to Nature that Gupta's fossils were identical to those missing from their collection. One of Brock's observations was that Gupta had used fossil images in several instances from the reports of British geologists in the early 20th century: "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." admitted that Talent's accusations were valid. Yet, in good faith, he, Jain and Gupta reported the discovery of the Himalayan ostracod in 1982. When the controversy broke out in 1989, Bhatia consulted Robert Folke Lundin at Arizona State University, who confirmed that the Himalayan ostracods were the same as the American specimens On the same sediments, another collaborator, Udai K. Bassi of the Geological Survey of India, later verified that Kurig is not Devonian but a much younger Carboniferous sediment, and that the border and village records did not have any mention of Gupta visiting the site. Bassi, who had surveyed the area several times, attested that there is no Carnian sediment there, and that the check-post register or the villagers had no record of Gupta, Erben or any foreigner. == Reactions ==

Talent wrote that Gupta "inundated geological and biogeographical literature of the Himalayas with a blizzard of disinformation so extensive as to render the literature almost useless." 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, but he had declined. Talent replied, blaming Erben for ignoring or not being aware of a series of fossils Gupta had produced, and for trying to downplay the fraud allegations. He mentioned that the Moroccan-type ammonoids were available in large quantities not only in Paris, but also in Sydney, Australia, which Erben could have investigated. Writing in Nature, Gupta made a defensive response in September 1989. He stated that most of his explorations were done with other researchers, and that he was not alone in visiting the allegedly dubious sites. Referring to the Devonian fish which he had described with Janvier in 1981, he asserted that he had never met Chang or visited her institute, so that receiving the specimen as a gift was an implausibility. Ahluwalia affirmed that the fossils were recycled and assigned made-up localities, commenting that "most of the doubts expressed by Talent are well-founded" and that it was a "great embarrassment" that made him want to retract the published reports which he and Budurov co-authored. Dismayed by Gupta's manipulation of data and fabrication of specimens in a report he co-authored about the discovery of a conodont, Neogondollela regale, Bassi considered withdrawing the paper. He asserted that the Himalayan research was reported with accurate locations, as he had verified the fossils and explored the fossil sites himself. He criticised Talent for never examining the actual fossils first-hand, and Ahluwalia for misrepresenting some of the reports. He defended Gupta by saying there could have been a bit of sloppy field and laboratory work Panjab University issued a circular in 1990, saying it was "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. Then in March that year, the university took a controversial decision by instituting a scientific expedition team, 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 temporarily suspended from service in February 1991. The report of the Society for Scientific Values was kept confidential. The Indian National Science Academy also conducted an independent investigation but failed to come up with coherent findings. Geological Society of India The Geological Society of India, which claimed to normally avoid publishing controversial matters in their academic journal, feared failure to publish Talent's accusations "could be construed as aquiescence in the alleged fraud", and published two articles from Talent criticizing Gupta's research. The other, published in December 1989, presented further cases of fossil recycling and mismatching of the fossil sources. As Ian Anderson reported in New Scientist, the Geological Society of India made a "controversial move" by issuing an expression of concern, stating that "the fossil finds of V. J. Gupta are not reliable", but did not formally retract Gupta's papers. They requested Gupta provide them access to his collection of specimens, research notes and laboratory register, but never received a response. The report titled "The Himalayan Fossil Controversy" was issued on 1 January 1991, condemning Gupta's research as "fictitious and based on spurious fossils" and "incomplete bordering on disinformation". • 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 ==

The Panjab University Vice Chancellor Ram Prakash Bambah issued Gupta's suspension order in February 1991. That year, the University Grants Commission of India stopped its funding to Gupta, and Nature reported a note of disappointment over Gupta's reinstallation, calling it an "Indian rope trick". The resurgent controversy compelled Kapoor for a proper action. The inquiry started in February 1992 and lasted two years with the final report submitted in April 1994. Gupta could not make any evidential rebuttal, resorting to lame pretexts such as claiming that he did not have a good memory of his field research and never kept field notes. 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. and was assigned a course in environmental and ground water geology. Gupta was still defiant about his research and called the whole ordeal a "conspiracy by foreigners." He wrote seven books on environmental geology. Receiving a full pension benefit, he retired (some sources saying a premature superannuation) Dhiraj Mohan Banerjee of the Geological Survey of India condemned the university's ineptness on Gupta' continued service and superannuation saying that it "reflects the utter poverty of the Indian ethics." Gupta issued death threats to Talent. Gupta allegedly offered money to people to physically assault the co-authors of the Courier paper, Goel and Kumar. A few days later, the mother of one of them [not specified] was the victim of a hit and run accident, resulting in both legs and arms and several ribs broken. == Impact ==

Gupta's forgery has often been compared with the 1912 case of Piltdown Man, sometimes called the greatest hoax in science. Nature announced Talent's observations with a statement that it "will cast a longer shadow" than Piltdown Man because of its elaborate publications involving numerous discoveries through a quarter of a century, and multiple fossils and scientists. The New York Times wrote: "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." 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, Indian discoveries not only in geology but also in other science disciplines were viewed with suspicion. India came to be perceived as "a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research." The fossils were discovered from the Vindhyan Mountains in Central India by Rafat Jamal Azmi, of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, who reported in the Journal of the Geological Society of India in 1998. As Azmi announced the discovery in Science, it was immediately received with scepticism. When renowned palaeontologists including Nicholas Butterfield, Simon Conway Morris and Soren Jensen examined the samples, they concluded that they were not fossils at all but artefacts. They found no evidence of Azmi's claims. In 2000, based on the report of the expeditionary team, the Journal of the Geological Society of India issued a concluding statement declaring "that the identification of fossils by R. J. Azmi is far from convincing and that more detailed work is necessary before the authenticity of the find is accepted." recognising Azmi's discovery as genuine. In a further vindication in 2017, Bengston's team established that the fossil, estimated to be 1.6 billion years old, was that of an alga, which they named Rafatazmia chitrakootensis (Figure 4) after the discoverer, becoming the oldest known alga. Policy and popular culture 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". In 1991, a 52-minute documentary of the hoax was presented by Robyn Williams in an ABC TV programme ''The Professor's New Clothes''. 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". In 2013, S.K. Shah of the Palaeontological Society of India published a book Himalayan Fossil Fraud: A View from the Galleries. == Notes ==