By BILL HOPKINS
Courier-Post Staff
HADDONFIELD

Come October next year, on the 145th anniversary of its discovery in a marl pit here, one of the world's great dinosaur finds - Hadrosaurus foulkii - will return home in bronze triumph.

The prehistoric beast is being recreated by John Giannotti, sculptor and former chairman of the Rutgers University Fine Arts Department.

Retired from Rutgers after 31 years as a professor of the arts, he was picked over five sculptors for the project by HATCH (Haddonfield Acts to Create Hadrosaurus foulkii), a group created by the local Garden Club to select an artist and manage the project. The borough commission made the selection official at its mid-August meeting.

The Haddonfield dinosaur, a docile, duck-billed creature found in 1858, changed the paleontological world.

It was the most complete dinosaur found anywhere in the world at the time and it revolutionized the study of dinosaurs. It walked the earth here about 65 million years ago.

Giannotti, 56, said he's done scale models and large preliminary charcoal renderings of foulkii.

The sculptor will be working from a ladder and scaffolding as he works in his Giannotti Studios, located in a barn behind his Haddonfield home.

"The first part of the project is building the armature, a steel and wood framework, from the scale model," he said. He'll then build foulkii to almost actual size - eight-feet high and 15-feet long - and "on top of it I'll add an inch or two of oil based clay for the actual skin."

The one-ton, bronze work will be the main attraction of a landscaped fountain garden in Lantern Lane, a walkway in the business district.

Fall 2003 unveiling

It's unveiling next fall will kick off a celebration marking Haddonfield's "Year of the Dinosaur."

Giannotti will be working with wire loop tools "that allow you to model the clay and get the precise texture," he said.

Giannotti said he spent a lot of time at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where the bones of Hadrosaurus foulkii have been displayed for 144 years, and the museum of Natural History in New York City, where there are examples of fossilized skin textures of dinosaurs.

"It's not meant to be a museum piece, it's meant to be expressive, but I want it to look as realistic as possible," he said, adding there's some speculation to this day as to what foulkii really looked like.

"They found most of the vertebrae and major bones of the legs â.. but very little of the head," he said.

Spurred by HATCH

Giannotti credits the HATCH group for spurring on the project by undertaking a fund-raising drive and arranging the engineering and contract work for the project.

He said he had "extraordinary help" from Butch Brees and his son, Christopher. As a 13-year-old Eagle Boy Scout in 1984, Christopher, now a Haddonfield businessman, located the excavation site on Maple Avenue from old maps given to him by paleontologists at the Acadmey of Natural Sciences, while doing research on foulkii.

Christopher Brees generated newspaper publicity by locating the 1858 excavation site and organizing an effort to mark it with a permanent plaque. He enlisted fellow scouts to help him build a small park and granite monument at the site.

The event triggered a national dinosaur craze which never faded and reached an all-time high in the 1990s with movies such as Jurassic Park.

Several fossils have been discovered in the state's marl belt, an ancient sea bed deposit consisting of sand, clay and limestone. The belt stretches from Raritan Bay in the northeast of the state to the Delaware Bay.