Rowan’s Edelman Fossil Park and Museum will open in March 2025

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Rowan University announced recently that the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua Township will be officially opening its doors to guests in March 2025. South Jersey’s newest museum will be a mile from where Dryptosaurus, the world’s first tyrannosaur, was discovered in a marl pit in 1866.

Dr. Kenneth J. Lacovara, professor of Paleontology and Geology and the university’s Founding Dean of the School of Earth & Environment, is the museum’s founding executive director. He said the project has been in the works for about 15 years.

“The construction itself began just a little more than three years ago,” he said. “But as you might imagine, it’s a complicated project to bring a brand new, sizable museum into existence from scratch.”

The museum and fossil park are named for Rowan alumni Jean and Ric Edelman, who pledged $25 million towards the project in 2016. It is the second largest gift to the institution to date.

“It was Ken Lacovara’s excitement about this fossil park that absolutely just brought us into the project,” she said. “When this opportunity came up, we didn’t have to think long and hard about it.”

Ric Edelman said he expects the park to draw people from all over the world.

“People all across the United States and all across the planet are going to view this as a destination for their own discovery, their participation in the sciences as well as their deep learning of the planet’s history,” he said.

The museum is billed as an immersive experience that will not only teach about the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but it will take visitors to the present and the future.

“What we are really trying to do is to use the deep past to contextualize our present so that we can all make better choices for our future,” he said. “Our motto is, ‘discover the past, protect the future,’ and so you will think of this as the dinosaur museum, but I like to think of it as more about the future than the past.”

Among the museum’s features are full-scale dinosaur sculptures, an interactive fossil scavenger hunt, free-roaming virtual reality and live animal exhibits.

Outside of the museum halls, visitors will have a hands-on experience to find fossils in the quarry, observe paleontologists in active research and enjoy the dinosaur-themed playground with accessible features.

Lacovara said there will be plenty for visitors to explore indoors and outdoors at the park.

“You can spend a whole day in either space. You can mix the two if you want to get your hands dirty,” he said. “If you don’t, you can sit on our beautiful veranda with a cup of cappuccino that you bought in our cafe, and you can watch your kids down in the quarry collecting fossils for themselves.”

Admission prices to the museum are still being worked out, but Lacovara said that it will be comparable to other attractions in the Philadelphia region.