Get Ready for a Jurassic Adventure in NJ

The Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park & Museum debuts soon

Ric Edelman: It's Wednesday, February 21st. Today I'm going to share with you the 2024 most anticipated museum openings and expansions. This list comes from Smithsonian Magazine and Travel and Leisure Magazine. The top 13 most anticipated museum openings in the world include the Perth Museum in Scotland, Hampi Arts Labs in India, the Astronomy Discovery Center in Flagstaff, the Museum of Art in Brazil, the Go-Go Museum in Washington, DC,  Kunstsilo in Norway, the Grand Egyptian Museum in Egypt, the Museum of Homelessness in London, teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center in New York, the Nintendo Museum in Japan, the Female Artists of the Moulins Museum in France; and ranked number three on this list of 13 - the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum in South Jersey.  

This is something that Jean and I are pretty excited about, and we hope you'll get pretty excited about it soon too. The park is going to open this summer after probably close to a decade of development. It's a really fascinating story that most folks are completely unaware of. When the first thing you hear about a fossil park in South Jersey, that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, does it? But what a lot of folks don't know is that the very first dinosaur ever discovered, back in the 1850s was discovered in Haddonfield, New Jersey, just about 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia, yeah, New Jersey, a farmer was plowing his fields, dug up a bone, didn't look familiar. Ended up shipping it off to London, where scientists there determined it was from an unknown species and dated it tens of millions of years ago, which we now know was 65 million years ago, the Jurassic Period, the land of the dinosaurs.  

Well, the reason that we don't think much about dinosaurs on the East Coast is simply because of how we find dinosaurs. Today, we keep hearing about researchers going into the flats of Chile, or up into the Arctic or in China, the deserts of Montana. And there's a simple reason for this when a dinosaur dies, it just falls over. And 65 million years later, those bones are still laying on the ground, surrounded by rocks and desert. But on the East Coast, it's a very lush environment. The East Coast is filled with forests and trees and shrubs and brush and over 65 million years, all of that debris from those forests pile on top of the ground, effectively burying the dinosaur bones.  

So if you're a paleontologist and you want to find a dinosaur, or rather its fossils, then you're going to go where it's easiest to find them. And that means Montana and the Arctic and China and places like that. So what's with this fossil park in South Jersey, which wouldn't you assume is buried under 65 million years of leaves and branches and trees? Well, yeah, except for one thing. In the small town of Mantua Township, which is about a half hour southeast of Philadelphia, very close to Rowan University, where Jean and I both went to college and were Jean now serves on the board of trustees, in this small little town of Mantua, there was a quarry dug. This quarry was dug 100 years ago by a company called Inversand.  

They were digging the marl out of the ground, which was used as a filter for industrial waste. And researchers discovered about 80 years ago, as they were digging down deep into the ground, they discovered fossils. And over the decades, Inversand, being a very nice corporate citizen, agreed to allow paleontologists to do their digging in the quarry as long as they weren't interfering with the commercial operation, and they went happily along symbiotically for decades.  

But then came 2008 and the global credit crisis. Inversand went broke. Not only were they having trouble with anybody wanting to buy their moral that they were digging, China invented a synthetic version that was cheaper and easier to produce. Bottom line - Inversand had to close the quarry. Problem is that there was a water aquifer nearby, and as they were digging down, water was spewing into the quarry. Inversand had a 24/7 pumping operation to keep the water out, but as they were going broke, they were going to shut off that pump that would cause the quarry to fill with water, pretty much turning it into a lake.  

Along came Rowan University, its nearby neighbor. Rowan bought the property in order to preserve the quarry and enable the paleontologists to continue doing their research. Rowan also recruited Ken Lacovara, who at the time was on the faculty of Drexel University. Ken happened to be a graduate of Rowan and he also happens to be the world's most renowned paleontologist. He's the guy who discovered Dreadnoughtus, the world's largest dinosaur, down in Chile. Ken agreed to become the head of this brand-new earth sciences department that Rowan was creating, and Ken became the founding director of the Fossil Park.  

Now this fossil park is really very cool. It is a big hole in the ground. Researchers are in there every day digging around looking for fossils, and there are so many millions of them that if you spend an hour in the park, you're going to find fossils. And in fact, one day per year, Rowan would allow children into the park to do exactly that. Dig for fossils. It was called annual Dig Day, and it was a really great thing. You would apply by lottery to try to win a ticket, one of 2,500 of them, for permission to go into the park for an hour. This lottery proved so successful that the tickets sold out within ten minutes on a worldwide basis. I mean, think about it. How often do you get the opportunity to go dig for fossils and Dig Day was a really popular thing. The problem was it was only one day a year. So Ken made a presentation to the board of trustees where Jean heard the story of the Fossil Park, and she and I decided to give Rowan University the money they needed to build the museum and visitor center.  

You see, at the moment, there’s really nothing there but a hole in the ground. There's not even a porta potty, no facilities of any kind for visitors. So we're going to solve that problem by building this museum and visitor center. Once it opens this summer, you'll be able to go not only visit the museum and visitor center, you'll be able to go dig for fossils 365 days a year. Spend an hour there, you'll find some.  

And here's the cool part - any fossil you find, you get to take home. This site is unique in the world. There is no other place where the general public is able to go into a working fossil park and dig for fossils, let alone take home what you discover. And because of where it's situated, it's not in the badlands of Montana or up at the Arctic Circle. This is in South Jersey. It's within a four-hour drive of a third of the US population. This is going to be a huge magnet, not only for school children coming on field trips, but for everybody traveling between Washington and Boston on I-95, where Exit 2 is only 15 minutes away. This is going to be a hugely popular destination for tens of millions of people. We're really excited about it.  

And so I wanted to let you know that after many years of development, the construction is nearly completed, the building is done, the exhibits are being installed, and we're going to have the grand opening sometime this summer. As we get closer to the grand opening, we'll tell you more about it. In the meantime, you can check it out online. The link is in the show notes for the Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park and Museum at Rowan University.  

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