MANTUA TWP. — Imagine being a college student studying paleontology and having your own personal Jurassic Park as your classroom. 
 
 While lacking the real-life Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus rex chopping electrified fences and eating people, Rowan University tried to get as close as possible by purchasing the Inversand fossil site in Mantua to transform into an academic research site like no other. 
 
 At the bottom of the 65-acre quarry on hot and sunny Wednesday afternoon, about 100 people gathered to hear Rowan announce that it had purchased the site for $1.95 million. The quarry, off Woodbury-Glassboro Road, had been owned by the Inversand Company for nearly a century. 
 
 The university plans to create a new School of Earth and Environment and utilize the site as a naturally built "classroom" for research. 
 
 Rowan Univeristy President Dr. Ali A. Houshmand — a staunch supporter of growing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education — said purchasing the quarry is one more component that shows Rowan's commitment in furthering STEM learning. 
 
 "The next step of the economy is how do we clean water from the sea, how do we lead in drug delivery ... all of these things (take) science, engineering," said Houshmand said after the announcement. "We need an army of people in this field." 
 
 The school, and all the research and activities at the quarry will be headed by internationally recognized paleontologist Dr. Ken Lacovara, who recently joined Rowan's faculty. 
 
 He said: "School kids, citizens; when they find a 65-million-year-old fossil with their own hands, it's a transformative experience." 
 
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 "Swimming right through where your bodies are right now were a couple dozen different species of sharks, four species of big marine crocodile are here, four species of big sea turtles ... we find these things right here," Lacovara said during the event. 
 
 He believes the site could become internationally renowned. 
 
 The discovery of a bone bed at the fossil site a couple years ago led experts to believe the site might be directly tied to the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago — widely thought to have been caused by a large comet or asteroid impact. 
 
 Several years ago, the site was at risk of being lost to a redevelopment project of retail stores. However, after the economic downturn in 2008 plans changed. 
 
 Rowan University seized the opportunity to preserve the site for the long term. 
 
 Ashley Adams, a 25-year-old paleontology and geology graduate student at Rowan, was out digging at the site with her colleagues during the announcement. 
 
 "This might be a death assemblage of ... when dinosaurs died," she said. "This is a very unique site. There's not many sites you can just sit down and you know you'll be able to find something. It's abundant of bones." 
 
 State Senate President Stephen Sweeney and county and township officials all attended to celebrate the monumental purchase. 
 
 Rowan's board of trustees voted to move forward with the purchase of the site earlier this month. 
 
 Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerMKent. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook. ||||| Divers Alberto Nava and Susan Bird transport the Hoyo Negro skull to an underwater turntable so that it can be photographed in order to create a 3-D model. (Photo: Paul Nicklen, National Geographic) 
 
 In the waning days of the last Ice Age, a waifish teenage girl ventured into a Mexican cave. She would not emerge alive. In a dark passageway, she fell into a fathomless pit to a quick and brutal death. 
 
 Some 12,000 years passed before cave explorers discovered her remains in 2007 in Outland Cave in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Now scientists say her bones form one of the oldest and most complete human skeletons ever seen in the Americas, a unique find that's shedding light on a fierce debate about the first people to colonize the Americas. Genetic analysis shows the girl traces her ancestry to a vanished land that once stretched between Siberia and Alaska. That finding undercuts recent theories that the first people in the New World, called the Paleoamericans, originally hailed from southeastern Asia or Australia or even Europe. 
 
 The cave maiden gives scientists "opportunity to help answer the question of Paleoamerican origins," paleontologist James Chatters, an author of the analysis, told reporters this week. Her final resting place, "sealed off by water and darkness for more than 8,000 years, is a time capsule … of Central America at the end of the Ice Age." 
 
 The girl who entered the cave was 15 or 16, small and slight. She had decayed teeth and bones that bore signs of physical abuse. Fresh water was scarce in that age, so perhaps she sought the cave's pools. The fall into the pit broke her pelvis, and she died quickly if not instantly. Rising seas eventually submerged the cave. 
 
 The cave's stable temperatures helped preserve the bones, as did the neutral water that filled the cavern, Chatters says — a "lucky situation." 
 
 In 2007, divers happened upon the pit, deep enough to swallow a 10-story building and now filled with water. Scattered over the pit's floor were the remnants of a vanished ecosystem – bones from mammoth-like creatures, giant sloths, sabertooth cats and a teenage girl. The divers named the pit Hoyo Negro, Spanish for "black hole." They called the girl Naia, after the Greek word for a water nymph. 
 
 The upper right third molar of Naia, which was used for both radiocarbon dating and DNA extraction. The tooth is held by ancient genetics expert Brian Kemp of Washington State University, who led the genetic research on the skeleton. (Photo: James Chatters) 
 
 In her facial structure, skull and teeth, Naia looks nothing like modern Native Americans. Neither do other Paleoamericans. That lack of resemblance has given rise to speculation that the earliest immigrants to the Americas came from far-flung places such as Polynesia or western Asia. 
 
 But an analysis of Naia's DNA shows her lineage began somewhere much closer: Beringia, the expanse of land that once connected Siberia and Alaska and now lies under the sea. Today's Native Americans also trace their roots to Beringia. So the first migrants to the New World and contemporary Native Americans are all the same family, researchers report in this week's Science. Whether they lived in the Americas 13,000 years ago or live there today, they can follow their heritage back in time to the same people, those who resided in Beringia more than 15,000 years ago. 
 
 Skeletons like Naia's are "scarcer than hen's teeth," says archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University, who studies the first Americans. The new analysis, he says, provides further evidence that the first people to settle the New World "gave rise to modern people." 
 
 As a result of the new study, the "problem" of the different features of the Paleoamericans vs. modern-day Native Americans "has now been resolved," says geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley. "Of course, it's interesting, because it raises a new question: Why are there (skull and facial) changes? Is it really true that Native Americans have evolved … in such a short amount of time?" 
 
 Chatters points out that other human populations have evolved over short time periods. His team's next step is a more thorough genetic analysis of Naia, whose bones have more stories to tell. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1gs8pI7 ||||| Researcher Pablo Puerta next to the titanosaur's femur. Image: José María Farfaglia and Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio 
 
 Paleontologists based out of Argentina's Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio have discovered what is quite possibly the largest known animal ever to walk the Earth. The new species of titanosaur, as yet unnamed, is estimated to have weighed 77 tons and measured 120 feet long, making it as tall as a seven-story building. You know you're dealing with a true giant when it makes other sauropods look small in comparison. 
 
 Even more exciting is the sheer number of specimens recovered from the dinosaurs' final resting place on the La Flecha farm in Patagonia. Over 200 fossils have been found on the farm, representing at least seven individuals from this record-breaking species. On top of that, only 20 percent of the quarry where the fossils were found has been excavated, and researchers expect to find many more specimens in the coming years. 
 
 “What they discovered is a cemetery of dinosaurs the likes of which we had never seen in the history of Argentine paleontology," said Ruben Cuneo, director of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio, to US News. “Given the length and magnitude this animal will bring along when it's reconstructed, there won't be a building that can contain it. I think we're going to need a new home.” 
 
 The dig team, led by paleontologists Diego Pol and Jose Luis Carballido, concluded that the titanosaur remains were probably not transported into the quarry by rivers or other natural forces. Instead, the sauropods may have selected an isolated Late Cretaceous flood plain for their last moments, in the same way that dying elephants occasionally seek out comforting grave sites. 
 
 There's also evidence that later on, the sauropods were pulled apart by marauding theropod dinosaurs. Over 50 teeth from the massive carnivore Tyrannotitan chubutensis were also discovered at the site, suggesting that some lucky scavengers had the feast of a lifetime 95-100 million years ago. 
 
 If new species has edged Argentinosaurus as the previous record holder for world's largest land animal, but both may have been dwarfed by the mysterious Amphicoelias fragillimus. Based on descriptions of a single fossil, Amphicoelias could have weighed 135 tons, almost twice as much as this freshly discovered sauropod. 
 
 The estimated size of Amphicoelias in red. Image via Matt Martyniuk. 
 
 But the story behind this animal is somewhat suspect. An Amphicoelias vertebrate and femur were discovered in 1877 at the height of the Bone Wars, but the specimens were somehow lost in the subsequent decades. All modern paleontologists have to go on are the notes of the legendary fossil hunter Edward Drinker Cope. Studying an animal secondhand is obviously not ideal, and Amphicoelias is usually excluded from the list of biggest dinosaurs based on lack of evidence. 
 
 Along those lines, some paleontologists think the new titanosaur needs to be subjected to more scrutiny before it is proclaimed the biggest land animal ever. "Whether or not the new animal really will be the largest sauropod we know remains to be seen," said Paul Upchurch, a paleontologist at the University College of London, to ABC News. 
 
 "Certainly the new animal appears to be at least as large as Argentinosaurus, and is a new species," he said. "Its real scientific value comes from the fact that it looks like this new form will be more complete than Argentinosaurus, so we'll get a better look at the anatomy of one of these super-giants." 
 
 And as Brian Switek explained, "Even sauropods known from a decent amount of material are still too incompletely known to get a direct idea of how long and heavy they were." 
 
 So while dinophiles around the world are right to celebrate this momentous find, it's important to always say “for now” with record-breaking dinosaurs. The new titanosaur may be the top dog in 2014, but no doubt there are plenty of mind-boggling species that have yet to be unearthed.
– Amateur enthusiasts and kids on field trips have been flocking to a New Jersey quarry pit for years to dig up some of its many prehistoric fossils. Incredibly, this pit may also be the only known dinosaur graveyard dating back to their destruction 66 million years ago, the New York Times reports. "It sounds silly, but is it the case that this pit in South Jersey, behind Lowe's, has the one window into this pivotal moment in time?" asks Kenneth Lacovara, who teaches geology and paleontology at Rowan University. The pit, which was in a shallow sea on the dinosaurs' last day, happens to contain a host of fossils about 40 feet down—which puts it around the "extinction layer" marked by an element found in comets and asteroids called radioactive iridium. "We are in the trying-to-poke-holes-in-it phase," says Lacovara. "Certainly we have rocks that are near that time. I know we're damned close." Owned by a water treatment plant for nearly a century, it became unprofitable due to environmental regulations and was slated to become a lake—until Rowan, pressed by Lacovara, bought it for $1.95 million, the Star-Ledger reported in September. Now Lacovara wants even more school trips and fossil days so enthusiasts can search through the muck in Mantua Township, NJ. "We really want to integrate this in the community," he says. "Kids start to think of science as a process. It's a way of asking questions about your world."