Himalayan fossil hoax
[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.
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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
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.
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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
"[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 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.
[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.
"[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.
[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.
"[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.
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.
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.
"[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.
