Bones Atop the Fireplace: How the World's Most Intact Dinosaur Skeleton was Found In New Jersey in 1858

  Philadelphia based lawyer, prison reformer, writer, amateur geologist and all-around Renaissance man William Foulke is visiting an acquaintance in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

It is springtime in the year 1858 as Foulke and local farmer John Estaugh Hopkins sit casually chatting in the parlor of Hopkins rather modest farmhouse.  Hopkins is a comfortable, though not overly well off farmer, and a lifelong resident of Haddonfield who is very involved in local government. 

Foulke has come to Hopkins residence to discuss the conditions of local jails and make recommendations about policies and procedures regarding criminal detention in the area.

As the two exchange small talk something sitting atop the mantle of Hopkin’s fireplace catches the inquisitive scientific eye of William Foulke.

There are several enormous and very unique looking animal bones sitting haphazardly on Hopkins’ mantle.

With his curiosity piqued Foulke inquires, “John, where did you ever acquire those large bones?”

“About twenty years ago, in 1838,” John Estaugh Hopkins begins, “I found them in a marl pit just outside of town when I was collecting clay to use as fertilizer on the farm.”

William Parker Foulke

         William Foulke stands up and walks towards the fireplace where he picks up the bones.  In his hands he can feel their tremendous weight and density.  A weight and density unlike anything he has ever felt before.

“And you’ve kept them here ever since?”

“Ever since,” Hopkins replies.  “I’ve had them there ever since.  Right on the mantle.”

“And have you ever shown them to anyone else?  Ever asked an expert to come and study them?”  Foulke continues to ask.  His eyes wide with excitement now.

Somewhat perplexed, his friend John Estaugh Hopkins replies, “Well, I don’t know what you’re after there Bill, but all the folks around here in Haddonfield know that they’re there.  There’s plenty of those types of bones outside of town in the marl pits where the clay is.  I just picked those up cause they were so big and I thought they’d look nice up there on my mantle.”

Foulke picks up one of the large bones, a gigantic femur and then places it back down atop the mantle.  In the flickering firelight he turns to his friend and says, “This is amazing!  Do you know what you have found?”

This is how the largest intact dinosaur skeleton ever to be unearthed in the world up to that time was first discovered by William Foulke in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Haddonfield, New Jersey sits only several miles outside of Philadelphia in the central part of the state just a short distance east of the Delaware River.

The land around Haddonfield is home to something called the Woodbury Formation, a unique geologic site, unlike anything else in the United States, that is found only near the Cooper River (a tributary of the Delaware) in central New Jersey.

  The Woodbury Formation is a one of a kind landmass that consists of silts composed of dense clays (marl) and carbonized wood and pyrite that have been slowly built up and deposited over millions of years.  Roughly speaking, the Woodbury Formation indicates that the area where the Delaware River now runs was once, in fact, an oceanic coastline.

Shaded areas is the site of prehistoric coastline and Woodbury Formation

After that casual conversation with local farmer John Estaugh Hopkins, in 1858,  influential Philadelphian William Foulke organized a large dig in and around the Woodbury Formation where Hopkins said he had found the gigantic bones that had been resting above his fireplace for the last two decades.

Now known to history as the man who discovered the first full dinosaur skeleton ever unearthed in North America, even had he never given those odd bones a second thought back in 1858, William Parker Foulke still would have lived a very noteworthy life indeed.

Foulke was born into a devout Quaker family in the year 1816 and he was admitted to the bar in Philadelphia at the age of twenty-five in 1841.  During his time as a lawyer, through working closely with incarcerated individuals, Foulke became one of the first out-spoken critics of the then current prison system in the United States which was  based solely on punishment and suffering without giving any thought whatsoever to prisoner reform or rehabilitation.

  As a devout Quaker, Foulke believed that incarceration should be more about pentitance, change, solitary reflection and less about physical misery and suffering.  As a result he was responsible for many prison reforms and was instrumental in designing the Lancaster County Prison in eastern Pennsylvania, a penitentiary whose layout and utility was so far-reaching that it is still in active operation today as a county jail currently housing up to 950 inmates at any one time.

Front of the Lancaster County Prison in Pennsylvania

Active as a prison reformer, abolitionist, member of the Philadelphia Society of Natural Sciences, the American Academy of Music and a criminal defense attorney William Parker Foulke still found the time, despite it all, to be an accomplished amateur geologist with an amazing eye for detail.

The moment he saw those bones sitting atop John Estuagh Hopkins fireplace in 1858 he knew that he had found something special.

Almost immediately, Hopkins contacted his connections at the Philadelphia Society of Natural Sciences and organized a team to excavate the marl pit near Haddonfield, New Jersey, that was part of the geologically rich Woodbury Formation.

The team quickly began to unearth enormous bone after enormous bone after enormous bone from the pits of clay.  Realizing that what he may have stumbled upon might be a large intact skeleton of an, as yet unknown dinosaur, Foulke contacted University of Pennsylvania paleontologist and anatomist Joseph Leidy to help him piece together his discovery.

Leidy realized that the bones Foulke and his team had dug up near Haddonfield were very similar to dinosaur bones that had been unearthed about a decade before in England.  Those bones that had previously been discovered in England in the 1840’s belonged to a type of dinosaur called the Iguanadon because that skeleton had all the characteristics of an enormous prehistoric iguana.

But Leidy noticed that though many of the bones were similar to those of an Iguanadon, what he and Foulke had found just outside of Haddonfield was still somewhat different.

The skeleton that Foulke and Leidy unearthed had not only many of the characteristics of a giant lizard skeleton, but also those of a giant bird skeleton as well!

From the bones discovered in the marl pit just outside of Haddonfield, Leidy was able to reconstruct the upright skeleton of a newly found bipedal dinosaur that he named the Hadrosaurus in honor of where it had first been discovered.

Dr. Joseph Leidy

Hadrosaurus weighed about seven or eight tons and stood about ten feet high.  In 1858, the year that Foulke and Leidy discovered Hadrosaurus, there had been up to that time no other bipedal dinosaur skeletons yet found on earth.  Up until Leidy was able to fully piece together the skeleton of Hadrosaurus from the bones that Foulke had dug up in the marl pit in Haddonfield, New Jersey, most of the world’s paleontologists believed that all dinosaurs had been quadrupeds that walked, or waddled, on four legs not unlike iguanas or other large lizard species.

The Hadrosaurs became the first ever mounted dinosaur skeleton to be shown for public viewing in a museum when it was put on display by the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences of which William Parker Foulke was an influential member.

To this day, the first skeleton of the Hadrosaurus remains kept in storage by the Philadelphia Academy of the Natural Sciences and is still brought out in the form of a plaster cast from time to time since the original discovered by Foulke and Leidy over 170 years ago is by now too fragile and delicate for public showings. 

Today, thanks in part to the pioneering work of early paleontogist Joseph Leidy and his meticulous study of the bones of the Hadrosaurus discovered by lawyer William Foulke in Haddonfield, New Jersey, most researchers in the field of paleontology believe that dinosaurs themselves might have generally been more closely related to modern birds rather than lizards as was once originally thought.

Local Haddonfield Resident John Giannotti sculpted a statue of Hadrosaurus which stands in the center of town and commemorates the unique discovery made there by William Parker Foulke in 1858.  

Hadrosaurus statue downtown Haddonfield NJ

Today, William Parker Foulke is remembered for many things and he is quite historically famous in eastern Pennsylvania where he and his family had such a large impact on the history of criminal justice and prison reform.  But, perhaps, he should be better remembered as the man who through his own curiosity discovered the largest intact dinosaur skeleton ever found in the world in the great Garden State of New Jersey.

In 1994 the Hadrosaurus was named the official state fossil of New Jersey and many dinosaur bones continued to be unearthed for the remainder of the 19th century all across the Garden State from the Ramapo Mountains in the north to the bogs of the Pinelands in the south and everywhere in-between.