And yet, little by little, the graceful curvature of an ancient reptile is emerging, as doctoral students Elena Schroeter, 27, and Paul Ullmann, 25, match up jagged edges and glue them together.
"It's a job for young eyes," said their supervisor, Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor of biology at Drexel.
The finished product will be a nice display piece, perhaps at Drexel or its new affiliate, the Academy of Natural Sciences. It also may provide insight into various scientific questions, such as how turtles evolved and how they are related to other creatures.
The biggest question may be just what killed this animal and dozens of others whose fossils were buried nearby, in an age when much of New Jersey was underwater. The site, an old mine pit in the Sewell area, has yielded the remains of crocodiles, sharks, fish, clams, and snails over the years.
Hint: Like the turtle, all were found in a layer of sediment that dates to about 65 million years ago. Sound familiar? That's also when most dinosaurs met their demise.
Previously, some scientists have argued that the Gloucester County fossils were not the result of any one event but died in various places and happened to drift to the same resting spot.
But William B. Gallagher, an assistant professor of paleontology at Rider University who has been going to the site for decades, said that seemed unlikely. Like the turtle shell, many of the fossils are largely complete.
"This thing keeps producing these entire specimens, or near-entire specimens," Gallagher said of the site, where the Inversand Co. mines a mineral called glauconite. "This seems unlikely if you're talking about a random-chance process."
