A really big discovery

While on vacation in Haddonfield 150 years ago this summer, Philadelphia's William Parker Foulke heard an intriguing story: the discovery 20 years earlier of giant bones in a nearby marl pit.

Foulke, a member of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, got permission to excavate the site and brought the academy's Joseph Leidy to supervise.

What they found in 1858 would revolutionize paleontology: the world's first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton.

Previous incomplete dinosaur fossils had prompted theories of large, squatty lizards that once roamed the earth. But Leidy noted that the forelegs of the new discovery, which he named Hadrosaurus foulkii, were much shorter than the rear legs. This suggested that hadrosaurus walked on two legs.

Ten years later, Leidy reconstructed the fossils and Philadelphia became home to the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton. The display later moved to the Centennial Exhibition at Fairmount Park, which attracted an estimated 10 million people.

The site of the original find in Haddonfield was little noticed until 1984, when a local Eagle Scout marked the overgrown ravine at the end of Maple Avenue. Hadrosaurus returned to the spotlight in 2003, when the borough commemorated its most famous reptile with a 14-foot-long, 8-foot-tall sculpture at Kings Highway and Lantern Lane.

- John Duchneskie

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