Sankar Chatterjee
Sankar Chatterjee ( born May 28, 1943 in Calcutta) is an Indian- American vertebrate paleontologist and geologist.
Chatterjee studied at the University of Calcutta, where he received his doctorate in 1970, and worked as a post-doc 1977/78. At the Smithsonian Institution and 1976/77 Assistant Lecturer at the George Washington University 1968 to 1975 he was Senior Lecturer in Geology at the Indian Statistical Institute. 1978/79 he was Assistant Lecturer at the George Mason University, and from 1979 as Assistant Lecturer and Curator, 1984 Associate Professor ( and Director of the Antarctic Research Center) and from 1986 professor of geology at Texas Tech University, where he Paul W. Horn Professor for Geosciences and is curator of paleontology at the Museum. In 1998 he became a member of the Texas Tech Academy.
1991/92 and 1995 he was a visiting professor at the University of Tübingen.
He conducted research about evolution, origins and taxonomy of Mesozoic reptiles, archosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs and birds, for example, in the Triassic of India and Texas ( Keuper ( Dockum Group) of post Quarry ). He also conducted research in Antarctica ( Marie Byrd land and South Victoria Land from 1979). He erstbeschrieb the Rauisuchia Postosuchus kirkpatricki (1985, Post Quarry ) and Tikisuchus (1987, India, with Majumdar ). Other original descriptions are Technosaurus, Shuvosaurus (1993, named after his son, who discovered the fossil ), Awalkeria (1987, first called Walkeria ) Nambalia ( 2011 Fernando Novas, T. Kutty, Martin Ezcurra ), the Indian Plateosaurier Jaklapallisaurus ( with Novas, Kutty, Ezcurra 2011) and Peter Galton, Paul Upchurch and T. Kutty Pradhania (2007) and Lamplughsaura (2007 ) from the lower Jurassic in India and the Jurassic sauropods Barapasaurus from India (1975, with SL Jain, T. Kutty, T. Row - Chaudhury ).
He is also known for his studies on the evolution of birds. However, his identification of an ancestor of birds Protoavis texensis from the Keuper of post Quarry remained very controversial. The Fund would bring forward the origins of birds about 75 million years before Archaeopteryx and is still more bird show features than Archaeopteryx. He received support, for example by Evgeny Kurochkin and Stefan Peters, a prominent critic of the interpretation was Luis Chiappe. Others consider the badly preserved partly fossil remains of chimeras and the vast majority doubts as somewhat of a bird ancestors.
With the engineer Rick Lind and students in 2008 built a radio controlled model of a pterodactyl ( Pterodrone ). In 2007, he thought he could prove with the aviation engineer R. Templin that found in China Micro feathered raptors to glide would have been able to.
In 2009 he joined for the interpretation of Shiva basin in the western continental shelf of India as impact craters at the turn Cretaceous / Tertiary one, which then with about 500 km in diameter of greater extent than was the crater in Yucatán. Prior to the Deccan volcanism at the Cretaceous-Tertiary turn for the extinction of the dinosaurs had already been made responsible.
He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 2001) and the Geological Society of America (1995). In 1982 he received the Antarctic Service Medal of the National Science Foundation. He has the American citizenship.
Writings
- The Rise of Birds, Johns Hopkins University Press 1997
- With RJ Templin: Posture, Locomotion, and Paleoecology of Pterosaurs, Geological Society of America, Special Paper 376, 2004