Geoworld Dr. Steve Hunters Paleo Expeditions Stegosaurus Dinosaur Excavation Kit

Visitors are allowed to search nearly the entire site for fossils. Digs have also revealed plenty of the mineral vivianite, an iron ore that turns a bright blue when it oxidizes. Other fossils from the site include marine crocodiles, sharks, and mosasaurs. The soft, wet earth yields sea turtle shells, clam, sponge, brachiopods, and even shark teeth fossils. Rowan acquired the land and halted the plans to fill in the quarry.Īs tempting as the large piles of sand are, the best digging is near the stream that runs through the pit.

For a while, it was a toss-up between redeveloping the quarry into a new shopping apartment complex and preserving a wet, muddy, messy quarry that seems to be a doorway back in time. The pit offers tantalizing clues to what actually happened 66 million years ago: there are so many fossils in this single area, all intact, all of them from the same time period, that this New Jersey pit could offer the best proof yet of the mass extinction event theory. Lacovara proposed making the quarry into a permanent dig site, used both for university research and by the public.

He theorized that the pit was filled with a great many dinosaur fossils from the same time period as the asteroid hit, and excavating the dinosaurs would prove critical to proving the asteroid theory. Kenneth Lacovara, author of Why Dinosaurs Matter and the discoverer of the Dreadnoughtus dinosaur in Argentina. For a while, it was a toss-up between redeveloping the quarry into a new shopping apartment complex and preserving a wet, muddy, messy quarry that seems to be a doorway back in time.Įnter Rowan University professor and renowned paleontologist Dr.

Geoworld Dr. Steve Hunters Paleo Expeditions Stegosaurus Dinosaur Excavation Kit