A sneak peek inside of the long-awaited $75 million Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University on Wednesday was well worth the wait.
After almost seven years from concept and design to swinging doors open, it was hard to not think about walking into the grand hall of Jurassic Park.
But far from the fictional 1993 blockbuster movie, the South Jersey park and museum documents 66 million years of life, from the dinosaurs to today.
“What you’re about to experience is mind blowing,” said Ric Edelman, who along with his wife Jean, both school alumni, donated $25 million to the facility. “The experience you have here is unmatched and will last a lifetime.”
The EFM is a 44,000-square-foot facility overlooking a 4-acre fossil-filled former sand quarry. The museum showcases a collection of life-sized recreations of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. It also features immersive galleries that bring the age of the dinosaur to life.
Kenneth Lacovara, Ph.D, a Rowan paleontologist, led the two-hour tour Wednesday. It started after a five-minute, Hollywood-quality short film in the theater of the museum, detailing, with animation, the history of life on Earth.
The film featured a book of life, with dinosaurs representing only 2%, and humans a fraction of that.
Lacovara then marched a dozen guests out to the lake outside of the museum to get a look at the design of the facility and how it fits the surrounding ecosystem. Next, a five-minute walk to a 65-foot-deep quarry that museum officials say preserves an ecosystem from the moment an asteroid marked the end of dinosaurs. Visitors can dig for real fossils as part of the experience there and keep them.
“If you are a curious person, interested in the world, this is your playground,” Lacovara told NJ Advance Media. “There’s something here for everybody.”
The Edelman Fossil Park & Museum is set to open on March 29. Tickets start at $29 for adults and $24 for children 3-12, free admission for kids aged 2 and under. It is located at 66 Million Mosasaur Way in Mantua, Gloucester County.
One of the museum’s exhibits include a recreated Dryptosaurus, the first discovered tyrannosaur, which was found a mile from the fossil park site in 1866, and a 53-foot mosasaur, like one discovered at the fossil park site.
In the depths of the quarry, more than 40 feet below the park, more than 100,000 fossils from over 100 species, including mosasaurs, marine crocodiles, sea turtles, and sharks, have been unearthed, underscoring the site’s significance, museum officials said.
Only a few hundred square yards of the 65-acre site have been fully excavated. Still, they’ve yielded more than 50,000 cataloged marine and terrestrial fossils, from reptilian mosasaurs to sea turtles, sharks, bony fish, coral and clams.
The fossil park is on the site of a former industrial sand pit. Researchers have already turned up a fossil of the largest prehistoric crocodile ever found and they expect to turn up more important finds.
In New Jersey, fossilized remains of several late Cretaceous-era dinosaurs and reptiles have been found along a stretch of what used to be a shallow marine environment from Atlantic Highlands in Monmouth County, through Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington and Gloucester down to Salem County and present-day Delaware.
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Bill Duhart may be reached at bduhart@njadvancemedia.com.