A famous case of Indian fossil fraud and theft

In 1988 the world was introduced to Dr Vishwa Jit Gupta, an Indian 'palaeontologist' who had amassed an incredibly long list of scientific publications, many coauthored by eminent scientists around the world whom Gupta had contacted. The exposé by an Australian professor of palaeontology, John Talent (Talent 1995), contained damning evidence that most of Gupta's work was based on fraudulent material, whether fossils taken from other institutions but claimed to have been found in the high Himalayas of India, or photographic plates from older scientific works, which he rephotographed then reproduced to back up his claim that similar species had just been found in India. Over the course of 20 years his impressive list of scientific papers (some 400 or more works) held many anomalies in the fossil record, such as species found in an area where fossil sites simply should not occur, such as high-grade metamorphic rock zones, or species found in an area where they would be very much out of place according to prevalent biogeographic models.

Gupta began his fraudulent career in 1964, when he published two papers in the prestigious journal Nature, coauthored with his supervisor Professor Sahni. The papers reporting the finding of fossil graptolites in India were later found to be spurious—the graptolites they described had almost certainly been taken out of Sahni's collection of Burmese fossils. Shortly before he died, Professor Sahni discovered that his collection of Burmese graptolites had mysteriously disappeared (Talent 1995). Gupta's PhD (awarded in 1966) was also based on a mixture of fossils from unidentifiable localities and photographs plagiarised from a monograph on the fossils of the Shan States of Burma by one F.R.C. Reed. Gupta was later implicated in a number of fossil thefts and in some cases of fossil smuggling. In 1967 he spent some months working in the Geology Department of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he had free, unsupervised access to the fossil collections. It was later demonstrated that some of the Carboniferous corals, Palaeozoic conodonts and fusulinid foraminiferans which he reported from India had been taken from these collections.

In 1980, Gupta went to China and visited the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, where he was shown a large collection of the primitive osteichthyan Devonian fish Youngolepis praecursor from Yunnan. In July of that year he visited Paris and, at the International Geological Congress, he showed a specimen of the fish Youngolepis praecursor to French palaeontologist Philippe Janvier. Insisting that the specimen came from the Himalaya region, Gupta was adamant that they should write up a paper on it immediately, as he had to return the specimen to India. Five publications (including abstracts) resulted from this collaboration, in which an 'osteolepid fish closely resembling Youngolepis from China' was described purportedly from Zanskar, in the Ladakh region of India. We now know that Y)ungolepis is an endemic form only found in the South China terrane (southern China and northern Vietnam), and is highly unlikely to occur in India, especially in areas where the rocks had been subjected to high pressures and are grossly deformed. This was the first case of a specimen being stolen from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology and smuggled out of China for the sole purpose of committing scientific fraud.

After Professor Talent first exposed Gupta's misconduct, in 1992 the Panjab University Syndicate instigated an inquiry into his academic work. The final report, handed down in late April of 1994, found Gupta guilty on all charges: plagiarism, recycling fossils, inventing fictitious localities and discoveries, and misleading or duping his many coauthors. The report concluded that 'Dr Gupta is guilty of scientific mispractices' (Talent 1995). An article in the Indian weekly The World called for Gupta to be stripped of his PhD and DSc degrees, both of which had been demonstrated to be based upon fraudulent work. Strangely, though, when the Academic Senate of the Panjab University met to decide Gupta's fate, only five out of the 55 senators voted for his dismissal. Gupta was allowed to keep his position within the University, to supervise research students and to retain his degrees, but was barred from holding any administrative posts. Today he still works as academic at the Panjab University.

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