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| New Jersey Cretaceous environment, Karen Carr |
Find out what New Jersey looked like 65 million years ago and learn about the lives of dinosaurs.
Here, visitors can touch a real dinosaur egg, follow dinosaur tracks, make a dinosaur track rubbing, and hear the simulated sound of a honking hadrosaur. Using various clues and fossils, such as footprints, fossilized eggs, and dinosaur teeth, you can become acquainted with the creatures that lived in New Jersey during the Age of the Dinosaurs.
On entering the gallery, viewers see Karen Carr’s 30-foot mural, which depicts hadrosaurs with a nest full of eggs. Both the New Jersey Cretaceous environment and the hadrosaurs’ appearance have been recreated from fossil evidence. The mural includes a series of pop-out cases - containing petrified wood, fossilized pine cone, amber with insects, and hadrosaur skin impressions - which demonstrate how artists and scientists collaborated to interpret what the dinosaurs and their environment might have looked like during the Cretaceous period.
Hands-on interactive stations throughout the gallery encourage visitors to learn about the lives of dinosaurs, and characteristics such as their claw movements and crest trumpeting for communication. The exhibition focuses on dinosaur themes: Nesting and Growth, Tracks and Movement, Paleo-environmental Reconstruction (using paleontology to reconstruct the landscape of a specific time and place), Predator and Prey, and What’s for Dinner. In the laboratory area, children and families will have the opportunity to examine fossils and other specimens, using tools such as electric magnifiers and magnifying glasses.
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