John Alfred Talent (18 October 1932 – 27 March 2024) was an Australian geologist and palaeontologist whose research and teaching career was spent largely at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

[2] He is remembered particularly for leading the effort in the 1980s and 1990s to expose the large body of fraudulent publications by Vishwa Jit Gupta of Panjab University, which is collectively known as the Himalayan fossil hoax.

[5] Talent was awarded the a post-doctoral fellowship from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) with which he spent time in Brussels, Belgium, between 1961 and 1962.

[5] In 1969, he joined the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, a newly established faculty at Macquarie University.

[12] Mass extraction of silicified fossils from limestone samples using a specially built facility at Macquarie University provided ample material for these studies.