Digging for Dinosaurs at Rowan

Dr. Ken Lacovara has traveled the world in the name of science, but he foresees a time in the very near future where the science world will be traveling to South Jersey.

Lacovara is the founding dean of Rowan University’s school of Earth and Environment, grew up in Linwood, attended Mainland High School and earned his undergrad degree at Rowan (then-Glassboro State College) in 1984. In 2014 in the Patagonia region of Argentina, he led the team that unearthed Dreadnoughtus, one of the largest land animals that ever lived -- 85 feet long, 30 feet tall, 130,000 pounds and still growing when it died. Lacovara has literally “dug holes all over the world.”

But now, as Rowan University embarks on the development of its Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park located in Mantua Township just off Woodbury-Glassboro Road at Route 55’s exit 53 behind Lowe's Home Improvement store, Lacovara says it will become an international destination for those interested in discovering the days of the dinosaurs.

“We’ve already had people coming from all over the world to visit the Fossil Park for our events,” said Lacovara, who serves as a professor of paleontology and geology at Rowan and is also the Director of the Edelman Fossil Park. “We have people coming from Britain and California, we’ve had two sets of families drive all night from Michigan and drive up from Georgia and New England. It will become an international tourist attraction right here in Mantua Township in South Jersey. It’s really going to put that municipality on the map and it’s actually going to make this area famous once again for its dinosaurs.”

Digging up the past

Lacovara says the region will become famous “again,” because South Jersey has long been known as a hotbed of dinosaur discovery, particularly from the mid-to-late 1800s into the early 1900s. The area specifically in western South Jersey following along the New Jersey Turnpike from roughly the Freehold area to the Delaware Memorial Bridge was extremely rich in dinosaur discoveries. The world’s first discovered tyrannosaur -- called Dryptosaurus -- was found in Ceres Park in Mantua Township in 1866 and the world’s first mostly complete dinosaur skeleton -- Hadrosaurus -- was unearthed in Haddonfield in 1868.

Other discoveries occurred at Mill Pond in Mullica Hill, in Swedesboro and Pedricktown, including the Mosasaur which can be found in the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia.

“The South Jersey area has two of the three important ingredients (for discovery),” said Lacovara. “First of all, it has rocks of the right age… so if you’re interested in dinosaurs, you have to find rocks that were laid down in the Mesozoic Era (about 252 million to 66 million years ago). In western South Jersey, the rocks that we live on are from the Cretaceous period (the latter half of time in the Mesozoic Era).

“Next, (those rocks) are sedimentary rocks, so that means you can form a fossil. You can’t have a fossil even if you have rocks of the right age, if it’s igneous rocks, formed by a volcano or metamorphous rocks, rocks that have been heated and squeezed.