Rowan breaks ground on $73M fossil museum

Gabrielle Saulsbery//October 12, 2021

Exterior artists’ renderings for Rowan's fossil park, the Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park Museum at Rowan University. — Exterior artists’ renderings for Rowan Fossil Park. – ENNEAD ARCHITECTS/KSS

Rowan University broke ground Oct. 9 on a $73 million project to bring visitors back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the Garden State.

The 44,000-square-foot Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park Museum is expected to create hundreds of jobs, and to eventually welcome 200,000 or more guests per year, the University said.

The museum will be set on a 65-acre property in Mantua Township that once was a marl quarry. Rowan purchased the site in 2015 and plans to make it a destination embracing sustainability, preservation and site-specific design.

The museum will feature high-tech, immersive galleries and exhibits alongside full-scale reconstructions of extinct creatures. A virtual reality center will present visitors with “the sights, smells, even heat of the Late Cretaceous period,” according to an announcement, as well as hands-on learning experiences and live animal attractions.

The museum is scheduled to open in May 2023 at 625 Woodbury-Glassboro Road.