A former gravel pit behind a strip mall in Mantua Township, Gloucester County, has become one of the most scientifically significant fossil excavation sites on Earth, and is now open to visitors as the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University.
NPR reported the story of how paleontologist Ken Lacovara transformed an overlooked suburban dig into a window on the mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.
Lacovara, who discovered the giant sauropod species Dreadnoughtus in 2004, a dinosaur that later appeared in Jurassic World Dominion, had spent decades working at remote sites across Patagonia, Montana, the Gobi Desert, and Egypt.
When he first visited the Mantua quarry in 2003, situated behind a Lowe's and a Chick-fil-A, he considered it little more than a training ground for his university students. He told NPR he was very wrong about that assessment.
From Students' Sandbox to Scientific Landmark
As excavation continued, Lacovara said he came to understand the quarry's extraordinary value. He told NPR that if he lived in Australia or Cape Town, he would still travel to this site to conduct his research.
Paleontologists had been recovering fossils from southern New Jersey for more than a century, but the depth and quality of what this quarry preserved proved to be in a different category entirely.
The site sits at a geological boundary that captures the final period before the mass extinction event approximately 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike ended the Cretaceous Period and wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.
Lacovara described the preserved sediment layer as representing temperatures somewhere between those of a toaster oven and a pizza oven in the immediate aftermath of the impact.
A Rare Record of the Extinction Boundary
According to NPR's reporting, Lacovara said the site offers the clearest available record on the planet of that pivotal and catastrophic moment, the one that eliminated the dinosaurs and reshaped life as it exists today.
He described it as the best window anywhere on Earth onto those events. No comparable site, he said, offers the same combination of fossil density and stratigraphic precision at the extinction boundary.
That scientific significance drew growing attention over the years, World Cup 2026 Delivered $3.5 Billion and 27,000-Plus Jobs to New York and New Jersey and the quarry eventually evolved from a university field site into a fully developed public institution.
The Edelman Fossil Park & Museum has now opened its doors, giving visitors access to the active dig and the broader museum collection tied to Rowan University.
Public Access to an Active Excavation
The museum's design integrates the working quarry itself, allowing the public to observe fossil recovery in progress rather than viewing only finished specimens behind glass. The site remains active. Research and excavation continue alongside public programming.
Lacovara's career trajectory, from remote desert fieldwork to a strip-mall parking lot in southern New Jersey, reflects how dramatically the quarry changed his understanding of the region.
What he initially dismissed as a convenient field trip destination turned into the primary focus of his research program.
NPR's full report, produced by Manoush Zomorodi, James Delahoussaye, Sanaz Meshkinpour, and Fio Geiran, includes an extended audio documentary running nearly 49 minutes.
The piece covers the geology of the extinction boundary, the history of fossil collecting in southern New Jersey, and the development of the Edelman museum from excavation site to public institution.
This report is based on a single source, npr.org, and has not been independently verified.