John Alfred Talent

For the Dutch cyclist, see John Talen.

John Alfred Talent
Born	(1932-10-18)18 October 1932 Ascot Vale, Victoria, Australia
Died	27 March 2024 (2024-03-28) (aged 91)
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Known for	Role in uncovering Himalayan fossil hoax
Scientific career
Fields	Geology Palaeontology
Institutions	Department of Mines, Melbourne, Australia; Institut royal des sciences naturelles, Brussels, Belgium (Research Associate), Division of Geological Sciences, California Institute of Technology (visiting Associate Professor); Dacca University (professor); Macquarie University (professor)
Doctoral advisor	Edmund Dwen Gill

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

His interests covered many fossil animal taxa, particularly brachiopods and conodonts. He worked collaboratively with scientists in many other countries, notably Russia, as well as in Australia where his principal collaborator Ruth Mawson and numerous graduate students helped to build a legacy of inter-related publications. Mass extraction of silicified fossils from limestone samples using a specially built facility at Macquarie University provided ample material for these studies.

Talent was a long-term contributor to the International Commission on Stratigraphy's Subcommission on Devonian Stratigraphy, working to align geological time-intervals around the world.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria in 1996.

Role in unmasking scientific fraud

Although it had been clear to many Indian palaeontologists that Vishwa Jit Gupta's work on the geology of the Himalayas contained so many implausible statements that it was useless as a basis for subsequent work, the full extent of the anomalies was unclear because it had been assumed that the problems were caused by incompetence. Talent and collaborators worked diligently for several years to catalogue the various types of misrepresentation involved, concluding that deliberate deception by Gupta took many forms, that his body of work was "fictitious".