Southern New Jersey will soon become home to a new state-of-the-art museum and fossil park. It will give visitors a chance to dig and learn about the dinosaurs and creatures that existed millions of years ago in New Jersey.

"Many people don't realize that southern New Jersey is really the cradle of dinosaur paleontology and some of the most important dinosaurs in the world were discovered right here,” says Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, dean of Rowan University’s School of Earth and Environment.

Rowan has broken ground on the $75 million Jean and Rick Edelman Fossil Park Museum in Mantua Township. It will open in May of 2023.

"The museum will be 44,000 square feet and will have three major exhibit halls, hands-on discovery center, a live animal center, virtual reality chambers, a paleontology themed playground…. A fossil field station where the school groups can come and get their lessons, nature trails, community gardens retail space and a theater,” Lacovara says.

He says that a wide variety of dinosaurs once roamed the area that would become South Jersey.

“The world’s first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton was found in 1858 in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and the world’s first tyrannosaur was found in 1866 a mile from here in Mantua Township,” Lacovara says.

He says that paleontologists are still making discoveries in the quarry near the museum. It is currently closed to the public, but researchers are down there frequently.

"Over there I found a 25-foot-long articulated crocodile. A couple of weeks ago we found a sea turtle that's a yard across, with an articulated shell that's 66 million years old,” Lacovara says.

Museum visitors will be able to go down into the quarry to dig for fossils themselves once it opens.

"In the layers where we let the public collect, if you try and if you're not afraid to get your hands dirty, you will find a fossil that's about 65 million years old and we let you take it home,” Lacovara says.

He says that researchers aren’t even close to being done discovering new items.

“It takes us 12 years to process 220-square meters, and this is a 65-acre property. So, there are literally generations upon generations of work to do here,” says Lacovara.

The site will be closed to visitors until the museum opens in 2023. The museum will make its debut as the largest carbon net-zero building in the state.