Wouldn’t you know it? Just a few weeks after I leave the garden state, the New Jersey State Museum – where I was a research associate – gets enough funding to start an extensive excavation of the extremely fossil-rich muck of the Inversand marl pit. This is great news. The Inversand pit is one of the last sites of its kind in the state – one of the few places left in New Jersey where paleontologists can investigate what life was like in the area 65 million years ago. (Despite the importance of New Jersey’s fossil sites to the history of paleontology – especially the study of dinosaurs! – many of the sites have been closed or paved over.) I’m thrilled that paleontologists from the New Jersey State Museum and Drexel University were able to get the money to really dig into Inversand.
The fossil hunters have been quite successful in their search, too. In addition to a mosasaur braincase, the team has also collected a nice specimen of a large, side-necked turtle. The video below will give you some idea of what the site looks like and what it took to get the turtle out of the wet, sucking mire that it was preserved in.
For more about the Inversand excavation, check out the New Jersey State Museum blog.
(And +10 points to everyone who got the Discworld reference in the title of this post.)
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