Have You Met New Jersey’s Official State Dinosaur?

Did you know that New Jersey has a state fossil besides a state bird, state flower, and state tree?

That's right, the Garden State has its very own state fossil, which happens to come from our state dinosaur. Yes, we have one of those, too.

What Is The New Jersey State Dinosaur?

Both the New Jersey state fossil and the New Jersey state dinosaur are known as the Hadrosaurus foulkii, according to Fossil Era.

Once you get to know the Hadosaurus foulkii a little better, I'm sure he won't mind being called the Duck-Billed Dinosaur.

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Can you imagine a 10-foot-tall, twenty-five-foot-long, 7-ton dinosaur roaming in the very places we drive through EZ Pass to take our kids to the beach?

How Long Ago Did New Jersey's Dinosaur Roam The Earth?

The good news is the Duck-Billed Dinosaur and EZ Pass technology barely missed each other by about 80 million years.

The fossils of this beast were uncovered in Haddonfield, according to the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.

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The initial bones were discovered by a farmer named John Estaugh Hopkins. When William Parker Foulke, an amateur geologist saw them a decade later he began an excavation that unveiled a nearly complete dinosaur skeleton.

Our dinosaur could stay underwater and use its toothless beak to mash down vegetation for food.

If you want to pay a visit to the skeleton John Hopkins found in the late 1830s, it's located at the Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences