Edelman Fossil Park & Museum’s greatest accomplishment may not be its dinosaurs

I attended the media preview for Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University earlier this month in my best Jurassic Park shirt — the one that says “Clever Girl” with a velociraptor on it. Don’t worry, I paired it with a blazer because I am a professional.

To say I was excited would be an understatement. No matter how old I get, dinosaurs never get old to me. I’ve been waiting for this new dino museum and dig-it-yourself fossil park, which officially opens Saturday, since I first heard whispers of it.

But fate sometimes has a funny way of tempering expectations. As I neared the museum’s address — 66 Million Mosasaur Way, Sewell, N.J. (clever!) — I was disappointed to discover it’s behind a strip mall with a Lowe’s and a Chick-fil-A, which seems kind of morbid, given the link between dinosaurs and birds.

As I drove behind the mall though, the geometric museum of cubes and rectangular prisms made of wood and concrete appeared, with a pale blue pond below it on one side and a pit full of fossils on the other. The strip mall faded from my mind and I was ready to start exploring.

A sign on a window at the front door informed me: “This facility is smoke-free, weapons-free and asteroid free (for the last 66 million years).”

In the lobby were full-scale reproductions of fossils found in the area — from a dryptosaurus dinosaur discovered in Manuta in 1866 to a flying reptile called pteranodon found in New Castle, Del., in 1876. Learning these guys were local gave me a shot of pride. I’ve been to Mantua and New Castle and these amazing beasts had too. We only missed each other by about 72 million years.

My colleagues and I were greeted by the museum’s executive director, paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, who is local as well — he grew up in Linwood and lives in Swedesboro. Lacovara is also a rock star, in the geological sense (though he was the house drummer at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City for a year).

He’s best known for discovering a new species of dinosaur in Patagonia he named Dreadnoughtus schrani. It’s a 65-ton, 85-foot sauropod that’s the most massive dinosaur whose weight can be accurately calculated. Lacovara is also a recipient of the Explorers Club Medal, a popular TED talk speaker (his talk has more than 4 million views), and the author of the book Why Dinosaurs Matter.

Make no bones about it, he’s a big deal, but he’s also just a charismatic and gracious guy with a great sense of humor. When my colleague asked if he had a favorite dinosaur, Lacovara said: “Do I have a favorite dinosaur that I didn’t discover?”

Edelman Fossil Park & Museum is Lacovara’s labor of love. The site was a longtime quarry where companies mined for marl, an earthy, sand-like substance that can be used as fertilizer and in water filtration. When workers mining the quarry hit fossils, they called up local scientists, including Lacovara, to see if they wanted to retrieve them.

A fossil that would normally take three months to excavate, Lacovara had to do in just 24 hours when he got the call.

Because he was doing salvage paleontology and following behind bulldozers, Lacovara couldn’t fully understand the significance of the site until he was able to rent a corner of the quarry to properly excavate it, uncovering what he called “a global gem.”

“So then I could start to see like, oh, we have a mass death event here, and it’s near the end of the Cretaceous period, that’s interesting,” he said. “Amongst the bones, all of a sudden this becomes the best site in the world to see those last moments of the dinosaur world.”

While some may think of Wyoming or Patagonia when they think of dinosaurs, South Jersey was also “a hotbed of dino action,” as bags at the museum’s gift store proudly proclaim. Learning about that aspect of local history was especially interesting.

“I think people are going to feel that point of pride of being in this amazing place,” Lacovara said. “I’ll have some people who will say to me ’This, this is in South Jersey?’ Yeah, we can have nice things too.”

When the company that owned the quarry wanted to sell it, Lacovara said he “knew I had to save this place.” The site was purchased by Rowan University, where Lacovara was the founding dean of the School of Earth & Environment, and the museum was supported by a $25 million grant from Rowan almuni Jean and Ric Edelman.

From 2011 until 2019, Lacovara ran community dig days at the quarry, inviting the public to dig for fossils with him. So the dig-your-own fossil experience — which won’t open at the Edelman until May due to weather — actually inspired the museum.

Many of the fossils found in the quarry (more than 100,000 fossils from 100 different species) are now on exhibit at the Edelman. I asked Lacovara if there’s anywhere else fossils are publicly displayed on the very site they were found.

“The only analog is the La Brea Tar Pits, but that’s not participatory,” he said. “You don’t want to throw your kid in the tar pit.”

The local connections continue inside the museum’s immersive galleries. In Dinosaur Cove there are full-scale models of dinosaurs and other creatures that lived on the east coast at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago.

In Monstrous Seas, visitors are transported underwater, through the expert use of lightning, and find themselves directly below a model of a mosasaurus, a 55-foot long extinct sea reptile, hanging from the ceiling.

“One of the really cool things to think about when you’re in there is because we were underwater here and because these creatures lived here, it’s a statistical near-certainty that every one of those creatures was actually in that spot at one point in time, so that’s about as real as it gets,” Lacovara said.

In the Hall of Extinction and Hope, guests learn about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and led to the fifth extinction, and they learn about today’s climate crisis and what we can do to prevent a sixth extinction event.

“We live on this amazing planet and we’ve had this stable climate for the last 10,000 years that has allowed civilization to flourish. But things change and right now we are changing the planet in ways that we have not seen since 66 million years ago when an asteroid hit,” Lacovara said. “So we are really trying to inspire people to learn from the past … and then inspire them to work together to create a better, more sustainable, more verdant future.”

The first two galleries are visually stunning. They feature detailed, fleshed-out models (including one of a rotting dinosaur carcass being eaten by a shark) and “magic walls” that use high-definition video and projection mapping to put guests underwater with swimming stingrays or on a vast plain with a moving heard of dinosaurs.

There are several interactive features, but I especially loved the tunnel that allowed me to crawl under one of the dinosaur scenes and pop up in a glass dome smack dab in the center of it, where I found myself in a precarious position between a mama hadrosaurus and her baby.

And while the third gallery — the Hall of Extinction and Hope — initially paled in comparison to the others for me (because it doesn’t have any dinosaur models in it), it’s the part I’ve thought about most long after my visit.

Through videos, displays, and interactives, the exhibit takes you back in time to the fifth extinction when an asteroid wiped out dinosaurs and 75% of all species on earth, and it takes you out into space, to illustrate how small our planet is in the vast expanse of the universe.

Here, you really get a sense of how precarious our existence is and the oversized impact we have on the only planet we’ve got.

“I want people to understand that we live on this tiny little lonely lifeboat in space. Sorry, Elon Musk, there’s no planet B. This is all we have. All we have is the Earth’s biosphere and its atmosphere and its hydrosphere and each other,” Lacovara said. “If you were adrift in the Pacific Ocean with maybe five other people in a little tiny lifeboat, how precious would that lifeboat be to you? How often would you monitor it? What would you do to care for it?”

The Edelman not only makes you feel small compared to dinosaurs, it makes you feel small in time and space, which is a much more difficult, and I’d argue much more important, accomplishment. For it’s only when we have the humility to acknowledge how small we really are, that we can do big things together — like build a dinosaur museum.

Senior editor for social storytelling Esra Erol and staff writer Henry Savage contributed to this column.