Whether it’s in media, toys, games, food advertising, natural history museums and a plethora of traveling mall and arena shows, our current would of dinosaurs has traced its history from its mother root to an 1858 discovery in Haddonfield, New Jersey. In 1868, the fossil — Hadrosaurus foulkii — became the first dinosaur skeleton ever to be publicly displayed anywhere in the world. That historic exhibit occurred in what is now the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in downtown Philadelphia.

This small east coast town of Haddonfield is the site of one of the most important paleontological findings in the history of the science — is hardly well known. Our local sculptor John Giannotti helped change that is a bronze statue of the dinosaur, which now sits at the center of the borough’s commercial district.

The discovery of the Hadrosaurus foulkii also triggered the infamous “Bones Wars” as scientists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh had to search across the continent to find and excavate what became an endless trove of dinosaur fossils. In the first three decades after its discovery, Hadrosaurus foulkii was such an important scientific find that a replica of its fossil bones was mounted in the main atrium of the Smithsonian Institution; another replica was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition that brought the world to Philadelphia.

Ultimately, the many finds of larger and more ferocious dinosaurs around the world came to overshadow the Haddonfield dinosaur but not its place in history as the first nearly-complete dinosaur skeleton. This proved that dinosaurs were real and set off all the events that now feed our culture of palentology.

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Sources

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/ornithischia/hadrosauria.html