The Edelman Fossil Park & Museum
How do you empower visitors to be citizen scientists?
- Institution
- Rowan UniversityJean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park & Museum
- Location and Date
- Mantua Township, New JerseyOpened 2025
- Role
- Executive Creative DirectorCompleted at G&A
- Project recognition
5 awards
- USA TODAY 10Best Readers’ Choice#2 Best New Museum in America2026
- Best of PhillyReason to Cross the Bridge2025
- AIA Philadelphia Design AwardsHonor Award, Sustainability2025
- Grands Prix du DesignGrand Winner, Architecture2025
- American Architecture AwardsMuseum Architecture2025
- Press
- Responsibilities led
- Experience strategyCreative directionPhysical and digital experience integrationTeam and client leadership
Overview
The museum turns paleontology into an active journey of scientific discovery. A connected digital layer empowers visitors: an RFID-enabled game personalizes their progress, projected media brings ancient environments to life, and an immersive VR experience places them inside a vanished world and puts them at the center of the story.
Together, these technologies extend the physical museum into a responsive experience of exploration, evidence, and agency.
Deep time
Deep time, evolution, our place in the universe: ideas that are hard to wrap your head around. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years and still went extinct. The museum makes that feel urgent now. Existence isn’t guaranteed, for anyone.
Low floor, high ceiling
Science isn’t some faraway thing; scientists put their pants on one leg at a time. The experience is fun first and serious all the way up: easy to enter, with depth for anyone who wants it.
“We’ve intentionally built layers into the experience.”
The fossil hunt
A fossil hunt runs through the galleries, mirroring the dig outside in the quarry. Custom wireless RFID fossils are charged and moved every night, so the hunt is never the same twice. It trains the eye to spot and name fossils before visitors head out to dig.
Three levels: just find it, for the little ones; find and identify, for most of us; scientific names only, for grad students. Families come back every rainy Saturday.
The VR world
The VR world is built from scans of the gallery’s sculpted dinosaurs by paleo-sculptor Gary Staab, among the most accurate ever made. The physical comes to life at full scale. Visitors become hunters and collectors, grasping at finds like any scientist starting out.
