Exposed fossils are not usually long for this world. Baked in the sun, battered by rain, and scratched by wind-blown sediment, gorgeous bones can quickly crumble into an irreparable pile of shards. Yet this fate is not always inevitable. Along a riverbank of New Jersey, an amateur fossil hunter discovered a lump of bone that turned out to be the missing half of an iconic Cretaceous turtle collected over a century and a half earlier.

While forests and parking lots complicate searching for fossils in New Jersey, there are a few productive spots hidden away among the developments. Among them is the Monmouth Brooks – a place where fossils laid down over the past 66 million years have eroded out of