Sankar Chatterjee

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Professor Sankar Chatterjee is a paleontologist, and is the Paul W. Horn Professor of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University.

Dr. Chatterjee's work has focused on the origin, evolution, functional anatomy, and systematics of Mesozoic vertebrates, particularly basal archosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and birds. He has done important work on poorly known Late Triassic reptiles in India, including phytosaurs, rhynchosaurs, and prolacertiforms, but he is best known for his work on vertebrates recovered in the 1980s from the Post Quarry in the Late Triassic Cooper Canyon Formation (Dockum Group) of West Texas. This material includes the large rauisuchian Postosuchus (named for the nearby town of Post), and controversial specimens Chatterjee identified as being avian (Protoavis). The recognition of these specimens as avian would push back the origin of birds at least 75 million years.

Dr. Chatterjee continues to participate in Dockum vertebrate paleontology, and takes an active interest in the fieldwork and research being conducted by his students and other workers at Texas Tech. In recent years, his interests have focused on flying archosaurs. He has worked on the biomechanics of flight in birds and pterosaurs and cranial kinesis in birds, and has also delved into ontogenetic and evolutionary issues relating to heterochrony in birds. Dr. Chatterjee is also involved with explorations into the neuroanatomy of these archosaurs. Larger scale interests involve plate tectonics (his original specialty) and paleobiogeography. Recently, Dr. Chatterjee proposed the Shiva structure in India as the possible crater of the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.