Science
A New Dinosaur Museum Rises From a Hole in the Ground in New Jersey
Ten years ago, this was just a big hole in the ground behind a Lowe’s home improvement store in southern New Jersey, an unlikely place to find what might be one of the world’s most important fossil sites.
But 66 million years ago, tantalizingly close in time to when the dinosaurs went extinct, a multitude of sea creatures died here — a “mass death assemblage” — and sank to the bottom of what was then a shallow sea.
Because of its prehistoric past as a possible mass extinction gravesite, the hole that was once a quarry has become the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum.
Built in Mantua, N.J., about 20 miles from Philadelphia, the museum welcomed its first paying customers this past weekend. For Kenneth Lacovara, a professor of paleontology and geology at nearby Rowan University and the museum’s executive director, it is the culmination of a decade of work.
“We’re doing so much here that I think has never been done in any museum,” said Dr. Lacovara, best known in paleontology for the discovery of Dreadnoughtus, one of the largest dinosaurs ever.
The fossils come with a hard-to-miss message from Dr. Lacovara, one that makes direct connections between the mass extinction 66 million years ago and today’s rapidly changing climate, which is putting many species in danger of dying out.
The museum’s motto is “Discover the past, protect the future.”
“That’s really the thrust of this place,” Dr. Lacovara said. “We need to act, and we need to act now, and every day of inaction or worse, every day that we go backwards, is a burden that we are placing on future generations.”
For decades, the Inversand Company had scooped from the quarry a dark greenish sand called marl, used for the treatment of water and soil. Tightened environmental regulations turned the site into a money loser, and Inversand looked to close it.
Mantua had hoped that a developer would turn the pit into more suburban homes and shopping. But the Great Recession stalled those plans, and the quarry remained a hole in the ground.
The mining of marl had exposed prehistoric sediments that extend throughout this part of South Jersey, but are typically inconveniently buried more than 40 feet underground.
Dr. Lacovara, then at Drexel University in Philadelphia, had started visiting the site, which included a fossil-laden layer that appeared to coincide with the mass extinction 66 million years ago. Fossils of anything that died that day are scant within the extinction layer, because the conditions needed to preserve bones are rare.
“This is something that I personally and lots of other paleontologists have been looking for all around the world,” said Dr. Lacovara, adding that he had sought such a layer in southern Patagonia, the foothills of the Himalayas and elsewhere.
“And I found it behind the Lowe’s in New Jersey,” he said.
More than 100,000 fossils representing 100 species have been carefully excavated from the quarry and cataloged.
Until the pandemic, the site opened once a year to the public for a community fossil dig, allowing people to collect fossils from sediments above the mass extinction layer.
Rowan University bought the site in 2015 for just under $2 million and lured Dr. Lacovara, who had graduated from the school when it was known as Glassboro State College, to join its faculty as the dean of the new School of Earth and Environment. Rowan also bought into Dr. Lacovara’s vision of building a museum.
“This is going to be a place to motivate young minds to become scientists,” Ali Houshmand, the president of Rowan, said in remarks at the start of the media tour.
Jean and Ric Edelman, founders of a financial advisory firm and also graduates of Glassboro State, contributed $25 million of the $75 million Rowan needed to build it.
“We immediately recognized that this had the potential to be a world-class destination,” Mr. Edelman said.
There is plenty of what one would expect to find in a dinosaur museum, which overlooks the fossil site in the former quarry. Near the ticket kiosks are skeletons of creatures that lived along the east coast of North America during the Cretaceous period. A mosasaur, a ferocious marine reptile, hangs from the ceiling, and a Dryptosaurus, a relative of T. rex, poses menacingly.
The museum highlights how some of the earliest dinosaur discoveries were made in New Jersey. The first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton — a duck-billed hadrosaur — was dug up in a quarry in Haddonfield in 1858. Dryptosaurus was the first tyrannosaur to be discovered, in 1866, just a mile from the museum.
Visitors walk a winding path through three galleries in the museum.
In the first gallery, an introductory movie provides perspective on just how mind-bogglingly old our planet is.
If the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth were a 1,000-page book, the entire 10,000 years of human civilization would be covered by just the last word on the last page. That sense of “deep time” is meant to set up visitors for an understanding of how unnaturally quickly Earth’s climate is changing now.
Life-size re-creations of dinosaurs, big and not so big, fill the gallery. In the warmth of the late Cretaceous, sea levels were much higher and North America was a series of islands. In one, a big, angry plant-eater known as Astrodon stomps a juvenile meat-eater, Acrocanthosaurus, to death.
“We want to show the gritty underbelly of the dinosaur world,” Dr. Lacovara said.
The next gallery highlights the marine creatures that lived in the seas here, including sea turtles, sharks and saber-toothed salmon. This part of New Jersey was about 70 feet underwater and 15 to 30 miles offshore. “In this gallery, everything you see here is something that was found on the property,” Dr. Lacovara said.
That includes the fearsome mosasaurs.
“I would say it’s a statistical near certainty that at some point in time, a mosasaur of this size was at that exact location,” Dr. Lacovara said, pointing to a re-creation of the creature.
Visitors then enter the Hall of Extinction and Hope. It shows the devastation that enveloped Earth after an asteroid struck the Gulf of Mexico off the Yucatán Peninsula, the fifth mass extinction in the planet’s history.
Then it turns to the present, which many other scientists describe as the sixth extinction as species struggle to adapt to the changes humans have made to the planet, including the destruction of habitats and global warming spurred by the rise in greenhouse gases released from the burning of fossil fuels.
One interactive exhibit shows the sharp rise in global temperatures over the past few centuries and allows a visitor to compare that curve with possible natural causes like sunspots, volcanic eruptions and cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit.
“None of those things explain the temperature variation,” Dr. Lacovara said.
But the simultaneous rise of temperature and greenhouse gases are “almost an exact correlation,” he said. “So at that point, you can draw your own conclusions.”
He said he wanted people to learn by examining the data themselves. “Not everybody is going to connect the dots,” Dr. Lacovara said, “but if they’re inclined to, our job is to help.”
At the last station, kiosks offer visitors information about how they can take action to offset climate change. “Because hope without action is really despair,” Dr. Lacovara said. “You’re all set up to make a positive change in the world before you walk out the doors of the museum.”
How might this message play in a time when President Trump calls climate change a hoax and his administration is dismantling projects and research aiming to move away from fossil fuels?
“I guess we’ll see when the museum opens,” said Kelly Stoetzel, the managing director who oversees the day-to-day running of the museum. It expects to draw 200,000 visitors a year.
She said she was interested in hearing the reactions of visitors who are skeptical that the planet is undergoing rapid changes.
“When they come in and they learn the science, can they be convinced to consider something different?” Ms. Stoetzel said. “Maybe.”
For Dr. Lacovara, the message is simple. “You can’t love what you don’t know,” he said. “And we’re hoping to make people fall in love with this amazing planet that we have so that they take action to protect it.”
The museum’s learn-by-doing ethos will allow visitors to become paleontologists for a day. For an extra fee, from May through October, visitors will be able to dig through the quarry sands for fossils that they can take home.
The museum also includes fun flourishes. Take the elevator between its two floors, and you’ll hear a snippet of popular singers of the 1950s and 1960s like Dean Martin, whose given name was Dino. Thus, “dino lounge” music.
At the entrance is the pronouncement, “This facility is smoke-free, weapons-free and asteroid free (for the last 66 million years).”
Dr. Lacovara is also proud of the glass used for the exterior windows, because it keeps modern-day dinosaurs — birds — from fatally flying into them.
“What I really love about it is, it relies on evolutionary principles,” Dr. Lacovara said.
The eyes of the first vertebrate animals, predating both mammals and dinosaurs, possessed four color receptors — for red, blue, green and ultraviolet light.
Birds, which are dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction, still have ultraviolet receptors in their eyes. They see images of spider webs that are imprinted on the museum’s glass, and they safely fly away.
“If you come up and you catch just the right angle, you can kind of see it,” Dr. Lacovara said.
Mammals, however, lost the ability to see ultraviolet light, because when they arose more than 200 million years ago, they were small creatures that scurried about at night — better not to be seen and eaten by the dinosaurs. There is not a lot of ultraviolet light at night, and in mammals, the gene that encodes that receptor in the eye was co-opted by the olfactory system.
As a result, mammals tend to have a good sense of taste and smell but cannot see ultraviolet light.
“To us mammals, this looks like clear glass,” Dr. Lacovara said. “And I know this because the forklift truck driver who drove through one of these panes was a mammal.”
With the museum now open, Dr. Lacovara hopes to turn his attention toward proving that the mass death assemblage in the quarry pit indeed consists of animals killed in the planet-wide cataclysm that followed the asteroid strike.
That has been hard to settle, however, because creatures burrowing in the sea bottom churned up the sediments. As a result, the marker of the extinction — a layer containing substantial amounts of iridium, an element concentrated in asteroids and comets — is fuzzy.
“It’s almost like looking through a shower door at something,” Dr. Lacovara said.
He said he had all the data he needed, but work on the museum had not left him time to finish writing the papers.
“This has been all-consuming,” Dr. Lacovara said.
Just days after the Trump administration completed millions of dollars in renovations on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to make it American flag-blue, residents and online users noted it had turned a phosphorescent green.
Here’s why:
The calm, still waters of the Reflecting Pool make it an ideal nursery for algae growth. Algae need nitrogen and phosphorus to grow, and the Reflecting Pool is primarily fed by the Potomac River, which gets heavy doses of those nutrients from nearby urban and agricultural lands.
The Potomac also absorbed one of the largest sewage spills in U.S. history earlier this year when a pipe burst five miles upstream of Washington, although that event probably happened too long ago to contribute to the algal bloom today.
Untreated sewage is high in nitrogen and phosphorus. When nutrient levels are high, feasting algae can quickly reproduce.
The Department of the Interior said when the algae first appeared that it was “residual,” from the supply lines to the pool.
Experts also speculate that the darker blue color may be helping the Reflecting Pool absorb more heat. The higher temperatures promote algae growth by allowing their metabolisms to shift into overdrive.
Summer temperatures in D.C. aren’t helping. This week, temperatures are as high as 95 degrees in the city, prompting a heat alert.
The combination probably explains the excessive growth, turning the water surface an opaque green and preventing onlookers from seeing the new blue hue of the concrete basin.
Algae are important and beneficial organisms when the ecosystem is in balance. They’re the base of the aquatic food chain, fed on by herbivores of all shapes and sizes, including shrimp and juvenile fish, which in turn feed organisms higher up the food chain. The single-celled organisms use the power of the sun to produce energy through photosynthesis, similar to houseplants on your balcony.
In an effort combat the algae in the Reflecting Pool, employees of the National Park Service were seen pouring in gallons of hydrogen peroxide, a chemical commonly used in pool maintenance.
The Department of the Interior also is employing a “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” to destroy the cells of the algae.
Ozone — yes, the same irritant that is in smog — is a gas composed of three oxygen molecules, and the small size of the bubbles allow the most gas transfer into the water, where it can damage algal cells, similar to how it irritates our lungs.
This only treats the symptoms, however. Generally, ozone nanobubbling is effective as a temporary solution for algae blooms. Longer-term fixes would have to address what makes the Reflecting Pool so ideal for algae, such as its depth, darker color and inflow of nitrogen and phosphorus.
In California, ozone nanobubbles also have been used in a project to improve water quality in the Tijuana River. The 120-mile river that runs near the border in northern Mexico and Southern California was the site of a pilot study in 2025. The U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission reported that the nanobubbling reduced “odors and bacteria,” but the project concluded prematurely after a flood swept some of the instrumentation into the river.
A plant extract that’s gaining popularity as a pain cure-all and has been associated with multiple California deaths in its concentrated, synthetic form has been approved for research as a treatment for opioid addiction by the federal government.
Kratom is derived from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa, a tree native to Southeast Asia, and is commonly made into a powder or pill.
Researchers say people in the U.S. are using kratom to alleviate anxiety, treat chronic pain or as a remedy for the symptoms associated with quitting opioids, due to its ability to bind with opioid receptors in the body. But recently, public health officials have raised alarms about a component of the leaf called 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH, an alkaloid that has the potential for abuse and addiction in high doses.
Last year, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department linked the deaths of six county residents to the use of 7-OH mixed with other substances. The toxicology screens for some of the deceased revealed both kratom and 7-OH, leading to a countywide crackdown of products with either compound because they’re unregulated.
Although there is no scientific consensus on whether kratom has therapeutic value, the Food and Drug Administration has recommended that its potent 7-OH form be classified as a controlled substance. Consumers who use 7-OH as a pain reliever expecting an experience similar to consuming kratom are at risk, said Dr. Mason Turner, president-elect of the California Society of Addiction Medicine.
“I have a couple of patients that I work with who use 7-OH for chronic pain management, not realizing the potential of the medication, and then developed an opioid use disorder,” Turner said. “I think in that case it was very clear they were seeking it for the chronic pain, not to get high, not to have some kind of experience, but really to reduce their pain.”
About two decades ago, Turner said, the healthcare industry started acknowledging the limits and risks of prescribing opioids for chronic pain. Some doctors pulled back on prescriptions, recognizing the potential for abuse.
That led some patients to find alternative solutions, he said.
“Maybe they don’t get a good benefit, or maybe the benefit from some of the other treatments is not as robust as what they got from opioids,” Turner said. “So they seek out some of these illicit products … or they look for kratom or 7-OH to be able to mitigate the pain.”
Turner said he supports further research into kratom and regulation because “it could be worth exploring as a treatment for chronic pain.”
On June 1, the National Institutes of Health announced that researchers from the University of Florida would begin the first phase of clinical trials on kratom to evaluate it as a potential treatment for opioid addiction. The research would be done with the FDA’s approval, according to officials.
“This … is a major step toward expanding treatment options for the millions of Americans struggling with opioid use disorder, which has contributed to historically high overdose mortality rates,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, in a statement.
Interest in kratom surged in the last couple of years as users have reported consuming the compound in the form of a pill, powder or tea to treat various ailments. A John Hopkins survey conducted in 2020 reported that 91% of respondents used kratom to treat chronic pain, 67% to treat anxiety, 64% for depression and 41% to treat opioid dependence.
A more recent study by the University of Michigan and Texas State University found that more than 5 million people in the U.S., including more than 100,000 children ages 12 to 17, have used kratom, the compound experts say is growing in popularity with young adults.
In the study, which analyzed data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health collected between 2021 and 2024, researchers say that despite numerous state-level bans on kratom across the nation, its use is at an all-time high and is increasing.
People between the ages of 21 and 34 said they used kratom at least once and 1% said they used it in the last year. The share of children ages 12 and older who said they had used kratom increased from 1.6% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2024.
The FDA has stated that neither kratom nor 7-OH are approved as drug products, dietary supplements or food additives, but that hasn’t stopped storefronts and companies from selling them as such.
Up until November you could find kratom and 7-OH products in smoke shops and specialty stores in California, but that has stopped.
“Until kratom and its pharmacologically active key ingredients mitragynine and 7-OH are approved for use, they will remain classified as adulterants in drugs, dietary supplements and foods,” the California Department of Public Health told The Times via email.
Kratom “Feel Free Classic” liquid products are displayed at a smoke shop in Los Angeles in 2024 before they were banned.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
In May, the California Department of Public Health and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a complaint against Ashlynn Marketing Group Inc., accusing the company of repeatedly flouting the state’s regulations on kratom products.
The filing, submitted in the San Diego County Superior Court, seeks a judge’s order to condemn and destroy the embargoed kratom products, halt ongoing unlawful manufacturing and impose civil penalties.
The California Department of Public Health “is pursuing legal action because Ashlynn’s continued manufacture and sale of these products pose a clear and preventable public‑health risk and violates state and federal law,” said Dr. Erica Pan, the department’s director and state public health officer. “7-OH and kratom-derived products have been associated with addiction, serious health harms, overdose and death.”
The state is alleging its inspectors visited Ashlynn Marketing Group’s facility in Santee in May 2025 and found kratom powders, capsules, liquids and chewable tablets being manufactured and held for sale.
During the visit, inspectors issued an embargo to prohibit the sale and distribution of all kratom-related materials on-site, according to the complaint.
Public health inspectors conducted follow-up visits at the facility in October and April, “collecting evidence at both inspections that indicated embargoed kratom products had been moved, tampered with and repackaged,” according to public health officials.
“In addition, investigators observed evidence of continued manufacturing and distribution of kratom materials,” officials said. “The firm’s owner continues to manufacture kratom products and ships orders weekly.”
To date, the California Department of Public Health has seized more than $5 million worth of kratom and 7-OH products, a spokesperson for the department told The Times.
California and Los Angeles County are considering whether to tighten regulations or ban the compounds altogether.
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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