Most fall festivals ask you to bring a pumpkin. This one invites you to dig up something that has been waiting 66 million years.
On Friday, October 16, from 5 to 8 p.m., the Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park & Museum of Rowan University in Mantua opens its doors after hours for Not-So Spooky Family Night, an evening that folds Halloween-season fun into one of the most unusual scientific sites in the eastern United States. A ticket includes after-hours run of the museum galleries, pumpkin decorating, a special quarry dig, a nighttime bug walk, kids' crafts, local vendors, and live music from Sophia Jolie. The Quarry Grounds Cafe and Museum Store will be open with seasonal specials, and for an extra $5 per person, families can catch a 6:15 p.m. screening of Hocus Pocus in the museum theater, seating permitting.
What makes the night distinctive is the ground it stands on. The museum sits atop a 65-acre former marl quarry whose fossil bed dates to the end of the Cretaceous Period, the moment an asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs. The site is the only facility east of the Mississippi River with an actively open quarry where the public can dig for real fossils, and its bed has yielded more than 100,000 fossils representing over 100 species of marine and land animals. Among them: bus-length mosasaurs, marine crocodiles, sea turtles, bony fish, shark teeth, brachiopods, and marine snails, all left behind by the shallow sea that once covered what is now southern New Jersey.
The quarry's fossils were first turned up in the 1920s, when the Inversand Company began dredging the site for marl. For decades the pit was simply a working industrial quarry, its prehistoric contents a curiosity rather than a destination. That changed in 2015, when Rowan University purchased the property from Inversand. A year later, alumni Jean and Ric Edelman made a $25 million gift that put the university's ambitions for the site within reach, and the fossil park was named for them.
The museum that grew out of that gift opened to the public on March 29, 2025, following a ribbon cutting on March 20 attended by the Edelmans and Gov. Phil Murphy. The $75 million project, designed by Thomas Wong of Ennead Architects with KSS Architects and G&A, was named by Smithsonian Magazine before its opening as one of the top ten most anticipated museums in the world. Its public galleries are conceived as metaphorical lenses for viewing both the present and the earth's deep past, and the building leans hard into sustainability: a timber structure, wood siding, low-carbon concrete, generous daylighting, all-electric heat pumps drawing energy from deep in the ground, and no fossil fuels burned on site. Bird-friendly glazing and native plantings across the 123-acre property reflect a broader habitat-restoration effort.
The vision was shared by the Edelmans, Rowan President Ali A. Houshmand, and founding executive director Kenneth Lacovara, the paleontologist whose team continues to analyze the fossils, the sediments around them, and the site's geochemistry. Lacovara's discoveries have landed him three times in Discover magazine's 100 Top Science Stories of the Year, and he has appeared in more than 20 television documentaries. The museum's stated mission is to be "a catalyst for good through the power of understanding the past" -- using first-hand discovery of fossils to put the present in perspective.
Inside, visitors can wander past full-scale dinosaur sculptures, an interactive fossil scavenger hunt, free-roaming virtual reality, and live animal displays. On this particular Friday, though, the galleries will be lit for an evening crowd, and the quarry itself will be open for digging after dark.
The bug walk is a nice bit of programming logic: a museum built around extinction and deep time turns its flashlights on the small creatures that thrive in the dark right now. Families are asked to bring their own flashlights. Pumpkin decorating is first come, first served while supplies last.
For a region with no shortage of hayrides and corn mazes, the appeal here is the collision of the familiar and the ancient -- jack-o'-lanterns carved within sight of a bone bed laid down when New Jersey was seafloor. At $5, it is also one of the cheaper ways to spend a fall Friday in Gloucester County, and the museum's own guidance is to book ahead: walk-up availability is not guaranteed, and the theater screening has limited seating.
Tickets and details are available through the museum's events page. The event runs 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, October 16, at 66 Million Mosasaur Way in Mantua.