By: Ronda Kaysen
MANTUA TOWNSHIP (REUTERS).- Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara is looking deep in a New Jersey silt mine for the exact moment, 65 million years ago, when all dinosaurs perished. That secret could be harder to uncover if the fossils here can no longer be unearthed after a housing and retail development is built on this open pit. Lacovara, an associate professor of biology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, looks at this 40-foot deep hole at the end of a dirt road and sees a line in the sand where the Cretaceous period begins and ends. Below that line are dinosaurs, above it, not a single one. He thinks that the creatures his team has been uncovering here all died en masse when a meteor struck the earth and changed the course of geologic history. If his theory proves correct, it would be the only burial ground of its kind and provide scientists with a living laboratory to study how the dinosaurs became extinct. New Jersey is the birthplace of dinosaur paleontolog