Sankar Chatterjee

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See Sankar Chatterjee in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sankar Chatterjee, Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Geology at Texas Tech University, and curator of paleontology at the same location. Chatterjee is most known for his controversial assertion that a fossil of his finding, Protoavis texensis, is the earliest known bird. Chatterjee has authored a lucid, though in some cases unsubstantiated and others confused, review of his conclusions on avian phylogeny in his 1997 tome "The Rise of Birds" and in further work published in 1999. Besides the validity of Protoavis and subsequent conclusions, Chatterjee has defended the Cracraft's vicariance biogeography hypothesis, and thus the holophyly of the ratite assemblage. On an equally dubious note, Chatterjee is also noteworthy for being one of the last researches to have proposed polyphyly of Dinosauria by attempting to show that some theropods arose directly from various Crurotarsi.