In the 1970s and 80s, Vishwajit Gupta — a professor at the Panjab University in Chandigarh — made a name for himself as an expert in the geological formations and fossil records of the Himalayas. Between 1966 and 1989, Gupta published more than 450 papers and five books on the subject, which burnished his reputation as "India's most celebrated fossil scientist".

Only — it was all one big con.

Now known as the "most notorious paleontological fraudster" and the "Houdini of the Himalayas", Gupta allegedly pulled off one of the most significant scientific frauds in the history of palaeontology, or the scientific study of fossils. In the 1990s, the discovery of what he had done caused a massive scandal in the international scientific community, and the episode became known as "The Himalayan Fossil Hoax".

It all began with a paper published in the prestigious 'Nature' magazine in 1967. In this paper, co-written with English geologists Frank H. T. Rhodes and R. L. Austin, Gupta claimed that he had discovered several 'conodonts', or microfossils of ancient marine animals which lived during the Cambrian to Triassic periods. This was the first discovery of its kind in India, and it catapulted Gupta to the upper echelons of the palaeontological community.

Over the next 30 years, Gupta falsified data, stole and bought fossils from colleagues and collectors from around the world, claimed to have found them in the Himalayas, often in remote and made-up localities and layers, and misled as many as 126 gullible co-authors to produce a prolific body of work. By collaborating with well-known names like Frank H. T. Rhodes from the University College of Swansea, R.L. Austin from the University of Southampton, and Gary Webster from the Washington State University, Gupta was able to lend a certain amount of respectability and credibility to his publications.

But there was always a shadow of doubt about Gupta's bold claims. Even though no one had seriously doubted Gupta's findings, Indian scientists S. V. Srikantia, H. M. Kapoor, and S.K. Shah had questioned the reliability of Gupta's research as early as 1978. Similarly, P. N. Agarwal had cast serious doubts on Gupta's conodont reports in an article for the Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India in 1981.

The first methodical and critical peer review of Gupta's research was conducted by Prem N. Agarwal and S. N. Singh of Lucknow University in 1980. What Agarwal and Singh discovered was a serious mismatch between fossils and their locations in most of Gupta's papers: the same species found in the same location reported in one paper were absent in another. The overall information was so inconsistent that Agarwal and Singh concluded: "These anomalies in different papers by the same author/s is not understandable, unless they are serious printing mistakes."

It would take another seven years for Gupta's falsifications of fossil records to become widely known. In 1987, Australian geologist John Alfred Talent, with his former student and associate Glenn Anthony Brock, meticulously reanalysed Gupta's published works and discovered over a hundred fossil frauds in Gupta's body of work. Talent first mentioned this at the International Symposium on the Devonian System held at Calgary, Canada, in August 1987, and then published a 50-page exposé in the Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, an earth sciences journal published by the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany.

The case became global news when the Nature magazine commissioned Talent to write a commentary on the Courier exposé. In his 3-page commentary, Talent provided reasons to suspect that Gupta's fossils were bought, stolen, or received as gifts from various parts of the world, and not authentically collected from the Himalayas, and that Gupta's research was a "quagmire of palaeontological disinformation."

As a result of Talent and other scientists like Gupta's colleague and former co-author Arundeep Ahluwalia's accusations, Gupta was briefly suspended by Panjab University in February 1991. In 1993, the University Grants Commission rescinded the status of the "Centre of Advanced Study in Palaeontology and Himalayan Geology" from Gupta's department.

In 1994, a court case led by M. S. Gujral — a retired Chief Justice of the Sikkim High Court — concluded that Gupta was guilty in all charges such as data recycling, plagiarism, concocting research locations, and conning other scientists. However, he was never held legally accountable for his gross misconduct, none of his fraudulent papers were ever retracted, and he was allowed to retain all his degrees. He retired normally in 2002 with all his superannuation benefits, and died on December 31, 2022.

The controversy cast a dark shadow of doubt over the credibility of palaeontological research and discoveries made by Indian scientists and caused irreparable damage to Indian science. Writing in the Science magazine in 2021, Indian science journalist Sanjay Kumar cited the case as the reason "paleontology lost prestige" in India.

To learn more about Vishwajit Gupta and the Himalayan Fossil Hoax, read 'Himalayan Fossil Fraud: A View from the Galleries' by S.K. Shah.

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