I went to the newly opened Edelman Fossil Park & Museum on April 20, and it kind of changed my life. 

First of all, it is just so cool. It is worth all the hype, excitement, and national coverage it has received. It is both interactive and educational without being boring and stuffy. It is beautiful, intriguing, and awe inspiring. The displays are immersive and connected, telling a cohesive story throughout the museum. As a viewer, you are completely sent back in time 66 million years and feel like a quiet observer. 

As I walked through the museum with the towering dinosaurs before me, I couldn’t help but feel like I was walking alongside them. The fact that I was walking through the very same grounds where they walked and lived, and all that had to happen to get them there, and to get me there. 

Our little part of South Jersey where many of us call home may not always feel like much. The land behind the Lowes in Mantua where the quarry is, may not always feel like much. All that Rowan has grown into and become did not seem like much 10 years ago when I was growing up. To think that our little corner of the world and what used to be a small teaching college is the home to a world of discoveries made me a little teary eyed as I walked through the exhibits. 

The museum does not just show off all of the fossils that have been found on site, they also explore topics of climate change, rising temperatures, and of course, the extinction of the dinosaurs. There is a short animated film played in one of the exhibits that shows the day the meteor hit and the subsequent events that followed. It shows a land lush with beautiful creatures, and then their slow death and the changes the earth goes through. The video ends with a small mammal who survived seeing the sunrise of the next day, representing the birth of a new age. I stood and watched the film in somber silence. 

I felt glued to the spot, unable to tear my eyes away from the short film. After spending the first 40 minutes of the visit learning the intricacies of all of these creatures, seeing the end of their life is emotional. You feel a strange connection to them, knowing that you both stood in the same spots millions of years apart. 

What made me misty-eyed was the end. In the wake of devastation, the sun still rose and life went on. Things changed and things ended, but life persevered. 

In this age of my life where it feels like everything is changing all of the time, it calmed my internal nerves and reminded me that the death of one thing leads to the birth of another. I will watch the sunset on one chapter of my life, and wake up the next day and watch the sunrise on the next. 

Although Rowan was not a part of my original plan when I graduated high school, and it was something I kind of happily stumbled into, all of the closed doors and endings that came before landed me exactly where I needed to be, and with people I needed the most. In the next series of opened and closed doors, I trust that I will end up exactly where I’m meant to be. 

As a current student of Rowan and soon to be alum, I am walking among the next great generation of change makers and leaving the way for more students to come. 

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