Rowan paleontologist, discoverer of the Dreadnought, featured in National Geographic’s “Ocean Drain” program Rowan Rowan Today
dreadnoughts was among the largest dinosaurs that ever lived. And although he ate only plants, he wore a tail, which might have been killed by some abductor.
Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, Dean of the Rowan University Foundation School of Earth & Environment and the foundation’s executive director Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua Villata, its 2005 discovery dreadnoughts and the years-long process of finding, excavating, collecting and classifying dinosaurs, over the episode. National Geographic’s “Oceans” program “Secrets of Dinosaurs”March 19
Through 3-D animation, CGI, and other 21St* technology in the century, the program explained how Lacovara set out in 2004 to find not only a species of dinosaur but an unseen Titanosaurus.
“I wanted to find the creatures that were the greatest to ever walk the face of the earth,” he said.
Are you looking for a dinosaur? Look where no one else has been
Lacovara explained that in the paleontologist’s program, the search for dinosaurs begins by locating rocks from animals living with “rocks at least 66 million years old.”
Southern Patagonia in Argentina, an immense body of land the locals sometimes call “fin del mundo, the end of the world”. It’s a sparse, beautiful area, but so remote, he said, that “there aren’t any other paleontologists working within maybe a thousand kilometers… You get on the ground and you walk around and you look for bones that come out of the ground.”
Lacovara’s team had been in Patagonia for almost a year when they found something, “a fragment of exposed bone that had weathered from a cliff face… We knew we were looking at one of the largest dinosaur bones that had ever been seen.”
Unfortunately, he said, the rest of the bones of that animal were not preserved. The good news was that if there was one bone, there were probably more “and enough for us.”
Returning with a larger expedition team the following year, Lacovara’s team struck loose mud, but it took four more years to recover about 70 percent of the fossilized skeleton.
In all the recovered fossils he named Lacovara dreadnoughts“Fear Nothing” took about five years, but it would reveal a previously unknown Titanosaurus of astonishing length, height and mass.
“This animal would have been 85 feet long, about the size of a basketball court.”
One of the first dinosaur fossils to be captured in a fully digital 3D scan; dreadnoughts He said it developed a huge and muscular tail “which can kill or incapacitate the largest predators”.
Dr. Aja Carter, a former student of Lacovara and now a paleo-roboticist at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Lacovara in the lab on the long and laborious process of extracting bones from rock.
“It’s slow, but I love it,” he said.
Said Carter, “it wasn’t that he was so big that he couldn’t eat something, it’s that he tried something as a weapon in case.”
Let’s learn more about full discovery, installation, “throwing” and assembly dreadnoughts, Watch the National Geographic “Secrets of the Dinosaurs” programwhich can be streamed through popular TV providers including Version FIOS, Comcast and YouTube TV.
A fossil closer to home
Lacovara is currently leading a project of perhaps the greatest consequence for Rowan University, Southern New Jersey, and generations of citizen scientists: the construction of an all-new, interactive $75 million Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park museum. This large, world-class facility is scheduled to open in the spring of 2024.
