Sinjini Sinha
Sinjini Sinha
Sinjini Sinha
Vertebrate Paleontologist
Sinjini Sinha is a vertebrate paleontologist. She studies exceptional preservation and mass extinction in the fossil record.
Sinjini has pursued her education in India, the U.K., and North America. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from the University of Delhi in India. Later, she also received master’s degrees from the University of Southampton, U.K., in vertebrate paleontology and from the University of Alberta, Canada, in systematics and evolution. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
After high school, Sinjini did not want to focus on engineering or traditional science majors like physics or chemistry, so she pursued an undergraduate degree in geology. She found fossils fascinating and enjoyed her paleontology courses, so paleontology was an obvious choice for her graduate research. As a master’s student, she studied Late Cretaceous (about 100.5 to 66 million years ago) sharks from India and England. She also studied fossil fish from the Paleocene (about 66 to 56 million years ago) Ravenscrag Formation, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Currently, Sinjini is studying mass extinction based on exceptionally preserved Early Jurassic (about 201 to 174 million years ago) fossil deposits. Such exceptionally preserved deposits are also known by the German name Konservat-Lagerstätten. Sinjini is examining how environmental disturbances negatively affected marine communities while at the same time enhancing their preservation in the fossil record.
Daring to Dig Interview
In this video, Sinjini discusses her experiences as a student in India, the U.K., and Canada, with an emphasis on her experiences doing field work. This video was recorded in 2017, when Sinjini was a master’s student at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Selected works by Sinjini Sinha
Sinha, S. 2019. Paleoichtyology and sedimentology of the Paleocene Ravenscrag Formation, Saskatchewan, Canada. Master of Science thesis, University of Alberta, Canada. Link
Sinha, S., D.B. Brinkman, and A.M. Murray. 2019. A morphological study of vertebral centra in extant species of pike, Esox (Teleostei: Esociformes) with implications for Cretaceous taxa. Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 7: 111–128. Link
Further reading
Time Scavengers: Sinjini Sinha, paleontology Ph.D. candidate. Interview, posted 22 February 2021. Link