Vishwa Jit Gupta (sometimes spelt Vishwajit Gupta, born 14 November 1942) is an Indian paleontologist from Punjab University who became infamous for large-scale scientific fraud. His publishing record based on work purportedly made over 20 years consisting of more than 400 research papers came under scrutiny after an Australian geologist, John Talent, researched his claims and work for nearly nine years so as to make a clear case of fraud. The discovery of the fraud began with Talent and John Pickett, who visited a road cut site in Nepal where Gupta had reported prolific numbers of Devonian conodont fossils. They found no fossils at nearly all the twenty sites he had mentioned but they found one site which yielded a fossil of a Silurian age. They subsequently chanced on his use of the same