Long before T. rex ruled the Cretaceous, there was another fierce predator stomping around what’s now South Jersey: Dryptosaurus. Discovered in Ceres Park, New Jersey in the 1800s, this dinosaur was one of the very first theropods ever found in North America—and it was a big deal. Imagine being one of the earliest paleontologists, digging up bones of a meat-eating dinosaur when most people still thought all prehistoric reptiles were slow and swamp-bound!

Dryptosaurus lived about 67 million years ago, just a million or so years before T. rex, and it’s actually a distant cousin. Both belonged to a group called tyrannosauroids, but Dryptosaurus had some unique features: it was slightly smaller (about 25 feet long), had long, muscular arms with big claws, and probably hunted in dense forests instead of open plains. Think of it as the scrappy East Coast cousin to the celebrity dinosaur out West.

What makes Dryptosaurus even cooler? It’s one of the few dinosaurs known from the Eastern U.S., a region that’s not as fossil-rich as the West. So finding a major predator right here in New Jersey is like hitting the paleontological jackpot.

You can meet Dryptosaurus in our Dinosaur Coast gallery, where his story comes to life—literally. Follow the journey of this fearsome predator from the moment he ruled the forests of ancient New Jersey, to his epic death, drifting out to sea, and finally sinking into the seafloor where time, pressure, and sediment slowly turned him into stone. It’s a wild ride from apex predator to ancient fossil—and it all started right here in South Jersey.