In 1858 in Haddonfield, New Jersey, William Parker Foulke learned while visiting John E. Hopkins that giant bones had been found twenty years earlier in Hopkins’ marl pit, then assembled a crew of diggers who excavated 40 bones, 9 teeth, and a small quantity of miscellaneous fragments. Dr. Joseph Leidy, curator at the Philadelphia Academy, identified the bones and sketched the first anatomical drawing of a real dinosaur. The find was the most complete dinosaur skeleton unearthed anywhere in the world up to that time and the first with enough bones to reconstruct key points of dinosaur anatomy, profoundly changing understanding of natural history. In 1868, the first mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world, Hadrosaurus Foulkii, was displayed in Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the scientific excitement generated by that exhibit directly triggered the Bone Wars. The fossils are stored at the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. Hadrosaurus foulkii, which became New Jersey’s official state dinosaur in 1991, lived nearly 80 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous era; it was a vegetarian duck-billed dinosaur that lived in herds and is believed to have cared for its young long after they hatched from eggs. The fossil was found in marl beds running through the southern half of New Jersey, where marl is a dense, mineral-rich, clay-like substance that was once the bottom of an ancient sea.
