The old quarry from above. COURTESY KEN LACOVARA
Atlas Obscura has an interesting story about a fossil site in southern New Jersey. The site dates to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. There is an episide of TED's pindrop, that also tells the story. Learn about Ken Lacovara, discoverer of Dreadnoughtus in 2005 and dinosaurs in New Jersey!
MANTUA TOWNSHIP IS LIKE A lot of South Jersey—15,000 people, the look of sleepy crossroads village combined with the chain stores and restaurants of a typical American suburb. One seemingly unremarkable spot in Mantua Township is a Lowe’s hardware store on Woodbury Glassboro Road. But it hides something extraordinary. Out back, there’s a an old quarry that’s now a giant mud pit. Descending into it, every step takes you back in time 400,000 years. All around are the lines in rock, called striations, that mark phases in geologic history. And among them, tons of fossils have been found. Despite appearances, it’s not unusual for the area. About 12 miles to the north, in Haddonfield, some farmers dug up the world’s first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton in 1858, a duck-billed dinosaur named Hadrosaurus. A few minutes away in what is now Ceres Park, the first fossils of a meat-eating dinosaur called Dryptosaurus were found back in 1866.
On this spot, 66 million years ago, everything was under about 70 feet of water. Swimming around the site of the Lowe’s were mosasaurs—dragon-like marine reptiles as long as a school bus, with paddles for limbs and a six-foot jaw. There were also crocodiles and turtles, and scores of smaller species.
That’s where Rowan University paleontologist and geologist Ken Lacovara comes in. Lacovara, who grew up about an hour away from Mantua Township, was behind the 2005 discovery in Argentina of Dreadnoughtus (Latin for “fears nothing”), one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. Lacovara first learned about the site behind the Lowe’s from a friend in 2003. So he started bringing his students there to practice excavating. It was a great site for that, but it also held a surprise—a layer with fossils that were still articulated, suggesting that the creatures in that layer had died suddenly, all at once, and settled to the bottom. Lacovara suspects that the layer could come from the moment, a little more than 66 million years ago, when an asteroid or comet struck the Earth, setting off a cascade that helped wipe out the dinosaurs and many other species. Evidence of that moment has long eluded paleontologists, and has not been without controversy.
