Retractions of old papers are on the rise: when should bad science be culled? Decades-old papers are increasingly being pulled from the literature, bringing a host of challenges. By Dyani Lewis

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03624-9 In August 1987, a scandal erupted over work on the world’s highest mountain range. John Talent, a palaeontologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, announced he had found numerous anomalies in research charting the geology of the Himalayas. All of the problems were in papers by Vishwa Jit Gupta, one of India’s most celebrated palaeontologists at the time.