New Jersey is a fossil hotspot, with answers about the day the dinosaurs died

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 .

Ken Lacovara examining a fossil Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University hide caption

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.

Edelman Fossil Park & Museum with their quarry fossil dig below Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University hide caption

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."