New Jersey's Fossil Record Reveals What Killed the Dinosaurs, And Why We Need to Learn From Extinction

A dirt pit behind a strip mall in Mantua Township, New Jersey has become one of the world's most important paleontological sites. What paleontologist Ken Lacovara thought was just a training ground for students turned out to be a geological time capsule: a sediment layer preserving the extinction event that ended the age of dinosaurs.

Over the past two decades, Lacovara's team has recovered more than 100,000 fossils representing over 100 species, along with iridium, an asteroid metal, all compressed into layers that tell the story of what happened in the hours and days after impact 66 million years ago. The asteroid hit near the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered a 10.3 magnitude earthquake that crossed North America within minutes. Global temperatures spiked to extreme levels within an hour. Dinosaurs, which had dominated Earth for 165 million years, were functionally extinct in less than a day.

Now housed in the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum at Rowan University, this research is a powerful reminder: extinction is not a slow fade. It's catastrophic, it's fast, and it's survivable only for those small and adaptable enough to hide.

Why This Matters Now

The Common Good Party believes science funded by public investment, universities, government research agencies, museums, creates knowledge that protects us. This discovery happened because Rowan University and its researchers had the freedom to dig, to wonder, and to publish findings without pressure to turn a profit.

The fossil record also carries a lesson about climate. We know from this evidence that planetary systems can shift catastrophically in hours. Today, we're changing atmospheric composition in decades. We have time, but not much, and not for inaction. The clean energy transition isn't a burden or a charity. It's the largest job-creation opportunity in American history, and it's also survival.

The people who've spent their lives in fossil fuel jobs, miners, rig workers, power plant operators, didn't choose the wrong path. The system chose it for them. A fair transition means retraining, wage protection, pension security, and new jobs that pay as well as the old ones. That's not ideology. That's keeping faith with working people while we move forward.

Read the full NPR story here.