Paleontologist Ken Lacovara Discovers Cretaceous Extinction Site in New Jersey Suburbs

Ken Lacovara is something of a paleontology rock star. In 2004, he discovered the Dreadnoughtus, a new dinosaur species that later debuted on the big screen in Jurassic World Dominion.

Lacovara has spent his career roughing it in remote excavation sites in Egypt, the Gobi Desert, Montana, and Patagonia. But his latest research is much closer to home — in the New Jersey suburbs.

What started as a dirt pit behind a Mantua Township strip mall has turned into one of the world's most important excavation sites, and is now the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum, which recently opened to the public.

A time machine back to the Cretaceous Period

Paleontologists have been collecting fossils in southern New Jersey for over a century, but Lacovara didn't think there was anything left to discover there. He first visited this quarry in 2003, located just behind a Lowe's and Chick-fil-A. At the time, he saw it as nothing more than a convenient place for his university students to try their hand at fossil digging. "And I was very, very wrong about that," he says.

Lacovara slowly realized that his students' sandbox might be something special.

"The more I saw, the more I learned, the more I realized that now if I lived in Australia or Cape Town, I'd be coming here to do my research."

That's because running across the quarry is a sediment layer that tells the extinction story — the most significant record to date of the days, even hours, after the asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, and spurred the 5th mass extinction.

An asteroid graveyard

In that layer, Lacovara and his team have recovered over 100,000 fossils, representing over 100 species. They also unearthed a metal called iridium, an element found in asteroids.

Lacovara says that when the asteroid landed near the Yucatan Peninsula, a 10.3 magnitude earthquake crossed modern-day North America within minutes. Followed by a second shock roughly 15 minutes later.

Within the hour, global temperatures shot up to "somewhere between toaster oven and pizza oven," Lacovara says.

Smaller animals, like our pre-human mammalian ancestors, likely burrowed into the earth to escape the heat. But dinosaurs had no places to hide. After ruling Earth for 165 million years, dinosaurs were functionally extinct within an hour.

In the aftermath, a 130-foot tsunami struck parts of the North American coastline, sweeping the dinosaur carcasses out to sea. They sank down to the ocean floor, creating the bonebed that Lacovara studies today.

"So this makes this the best window on the planet at that pivotal calamitous moment that wiped out the dinosaurs and really made the modern world as we know it," Lacovara says.

Many people in New Jersey and the surrounding area may be unaware of the Cretaceous treasure trove beneath their feet. But Lacovara hopes the opening of Edelman Fossil Park and Museum can change that.

A safer version of Jurassic Park

Edelman Fossil Park and Museum encourages visitors to learn about dinosaurs and even dig for fossils with their own hands. "There's no place like this," Lacovara says. "There's no place that combines a world-class museum with, really, a world-class excavation site."

Learning from dinosaurs to escape our fate

Lacovara insists that dinosaurs are not just for kids. He wants everyone to have fun looking for fossils, but he says it's important for adults to reflect on the dinosaurs' mass extinction through a climate lens.

"This world really isn't all about us, and we can see now through the lens of deep time, through the lens of geology, that things can go off the rails," he says. "We have had five previous mass extinctions, and every one of those, we know now from geology and paleontology, was the result of a climate crisis. If you think about it in terms of that asteroid, well, we are now the asteroid of our age. But we don't have to be, and it's not too late to turn the tide."

In that spirit, Edelman Fossil Parks offers visitors climate action resources. And the park's motto reads, "Discover the past, protect the future."

This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by James Delahoussaye and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.

The digital story was written by Fiona Geiran.