Paleontology in New Jersey
During the early part of the Paleozoic, the state was still covered by the sea, which was home to creatures like brachiopods and trilobites.
As time went on local sea levels rose and fell so the area alternated between a riverside or marine environment.
Dinosaurs inhabited the region in forests and swamps, such as ornithopods like Hadrosaurus, and theropods like Dryptosaurus, "Coelosaurus" antiquus, and Dromaeosaurs, as well as birds.
[2] During the Tertiary period of the ensuing Cenozoic era the local New Jersey climate was warmer than it is today.
[4] Mastodons living in New Jersey left behind remains in places like Mannington Township and the region between Hackettstown and Vienna.
[2] Two ancient Native American archaeological sites dating from between the years 1000 and 1500 preserved pieces of Miocene petrified wood.
Archaeologists who studied the sites have suggested that shamans may have burned the petrified wood to highlight its non-flammability, which may have seemed supernatural.
Caspar Wistar and Timothy Matlack presented a probable dinosaur metatarsal discovered in Late Cretaceous rocks near Woodbury Creek as "a large thigh bone" to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A tooth and partial jaw recovered from the Navesink Formation of New Jersey were described for the scientific literature.
1830 Isaac Hays described a new species of fossil fish from the Cretaceous of New Jersey that he named Saurodon leanus.
[15] Another significant event occurred around 1838, when workers excavating marl for fertilizer on land owned by John E. Hopkins uncovered some Late Cretaceous bones.
[16] In the fall of that same year, Foulke hired a team to reopen the Hopkins marl pit, which had become overgrown.
[68] He interpreted the fossils as the remains of a bipedal amphibious reptile that had been swept out to sea by the river it lived alongside.
[17] In 1865, Joseph Leidy described a single poorly preserved tooth of a Late Cretaceous theropod from the greensand at Mullica Hill.
The discovery included partial lower jaws with teeth, both humeri, the left femur, tibia, and fibula, and a large number of vertebrae.
The first was Leidy's work with artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to mount Hadrosaurus foulkii for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
[20] Also that year, Cope gave Othniel Charles Marsh a tour of the marl pit where Laelaps was found.
While there, Marsh secretly made arrangements with some of the workers for them to send any fossils they found to him at the Yale Peabody Museum instead of to Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
In 1869, a nearly complete mastodon skeleton was discovered in Mannington Township preserved in a grey bed of marl.
Samuel Lockwood discovered Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils along the shore of Raritan Bay at Union.
[21] One of the significant late 19th century events was Marsh's 1870 naming of a new species of Hadrosaurus, H. minor, based on vertebrae sent to him by his surreptitious contacts established at the West Jersey Marl Company's Barnsboro quarry.
[23] Rounding out the 19th century was Lewis Woolman's 1896 discovery of a 15 inch long fossil foot bone in Merchantville during excavations for a Pennsylvania Railroad underpass.
[24] Early in the 20th century, the end of a broken theropod foot bone was discovered in a Roebling sand pit on the Delaware River's south bank.
Dinosaur footprints were discovered in the Hampton Cutter Clay Works Pit at Woodbridge in Middlesex County but were accidentally destroyed while being excavated.
[25] In 1929, dinosaur footprints were discovered in the Hampton Cutter Clay Works Pit at Woodbridge in Middlesex County.
[4] Later, in 1966, Edwin Colbert described the small gliding lizard Icarosaurus siefkeri, which was discovered at North Bergen.
[26] More recently, on September 29, 1984, a small monument paid for by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was dedicated to Hadrosaurus foulkii near the site of its discovery in Haddonfield.
[28] Almost a decade later, on June 13, 1991, Governor James Florio signed a bill declaring Hadrosaurus foulkii to be the state dinosaur of New Jersey.
[28] In November 2014 a large cache of late Cretaceous fossils was discovered in a quarry in Mantua Township, and suspected to be a relic of the event that caused the Extinction of the dinosaurs.
