We study the numerical approximation of a time dependent equation involving fractional powers of an elliptic operator L defined to be the unbounded operator associated with a Hermitian, coercive and bounded sesquilinear form on H 1 0 (Ω). The time dependent solution u(x, t) is represented as a Dunford Taylor integral along a contour in the complex plane.The contour integrals are approximated using sinc quadratures. In the case of homogeneous right-hand-sides and initial value v, the approximation results in a linear combination of functions (zqI − L) −1 v ∈ H 1 0 (Ω) for a finite number of quadrature points zq lying along the contour. In turn, these quantities are approximated using complex valued continuous piecewise linear finite elements.Our main result provides L 2 (Ω) error estimates between the solution u(·, t) and its final approximation. Numerical results illustrating the behavior of the algorithms are provided. arXiv:1607.07832v2 [math.NA]