Ancient Web: Hoag Levins Mapped the First Hadrosaurus Dig One Page at a Time

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in America came out of a New Jersey marl pit. Hoag Levins built a small website that lets readers follow that history all the way down into the ravine.

Visit Levins's Hadrosaurus site.

The page is an illustrated local-history project, copyright-dated 1995–2008. Its navigation includes the original excavation, the first mounted skeleton, the animal's changing scientific reconstruction, maps, and campaigns to preserve the discovery site. The photographs and text are organized as separate pages, complete with decorative dinosaur heads and old-fashioned image spacer files.

A discovery with a neighborhood address

Levins's account of the 1858 dig begins at Birdwood, a Haddonfield house beside Hopkins Pond. William Parker Foulke heard that strange bones had been found years earlier in a nearby pit, then organized an excavation. The page describes the bones going to Philadelphia scientist Joseph Leidy, who studied them and named Hadrosaurus foulkii.

A separate gallery about reconstructing the skeleton is unusually revealing. Early displays gave the creature a kangaroo-like stance and reconstructed a skull using an iguana as a model because the fossil lacked its own. Later interpretations changed the posture and acknowledged that some museum mounts were inaccurate. Levins presents the revisions as part of the story rather than quietly replacing older images.

The site also follows a second, much smaller kind of discovery: schoolchildren learning how government works. Its 1991 state-dinosaur page records fourth-grade teacher Joyce Berry's 1988 class project, involvement of 97 pupils over several years, and the bill signed by Governor Jim Florio on June 13, 1991. It reproduces the legal designation, making the political story checkable against the document.

Some claims about being the first or most important in dinosaur history are the site's historical framing and should be treated with appropriate precision. But the preservation itself is concrete: place, excavation, public interpretation, and changing science coexist in one hand-built set of pages.

Explore the changing reconstructions and the story of the original excavation.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.