John Alfred Talent


John Alfred Talent was an Australian 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.

Biography

Talent was born to Alfred George Talent and Thelma Emily at Ascot Vale, Victoria. He studied science at the University of Melbourne, graduating in science with majors in geology, chemistry and mathematics in 1953 and completing his master's degree in 1955 with a dissertation on Studies in the stratigraphy and paleontology of some paleozoic limestones of Eastern Victoria. He obtained a PhD in 1959 on the thesis Contributions to the stratigraphy and palaeontology of the Silurian and Devonian of Gippsland. He followed this in 1966 by taking a bachelor of arts degree in 1966 with majors in French and fine arts, and a minor in Arabic.
Talent was awarded the a post-doctoral fellowship from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation with which he spent time in Brussels, Belgium, between 1961 and 1962. He worked there as Research Associate at the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique. He was initially employed as a geologist under the Department of Mines, Government of Victoria. In early 1967, he was visiting faculty at the California Institute of Technology. Late in the year he got appointment in the faculty of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, as UNESCO professor. In 1969, he joined the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, a newly established faculty at Macquarie University. After normal retirement, he was elected Emeritus Professor, the position he held till his death.
Talent served as president of the International Palaeontological Association in 1999. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria in 1996.

Contributions

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.

Unmasking the Himalayan fossil hoax

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".

Eponymy

Talent had many species and genera named in his honour, including:
Classis: Bivalvia:
Classis: Cephalopoda:
Classis Conodonta
Classis: Gastropoda
Classis: Pterobranchia
Classis: Trilobita:
Phylum: Brachiopoda:
Phylum Arthropoda, Classis Branchiopoda