On the outside, the yellow, bungalow- style home looks innocent enough, just like any other house on the block. A passerby would have no idea that this home was a time portal. Much more than meets the eye, this house brings you back millions of years into an archaic landscape filled with relics of inconceivable but true species now absent from the ecosystem.
The house’s resident is Ralph Johnson, an older gentleman with perhaps more hair on his chin than his head, who curates a paleontological research museum in his basement. There are more than 20,000 catalogued specimens from extinct creatures that live, once again, in this Long Branch residence. It is home to: a 30 pound piece of leg bone from a dinosaur that weighed eight or ten tons; remains from ammonites, which are relatives of squid that lived in coiled shells and traveled in schools; shells so well preserved that even after 75 million years the mother of pearl is as iridescent and shiny as ever.
Like the home’s exterior, the living room is inconspicuous with its plush carpets and chairs with velour cushions as well as glass and ceramic figures resting on tabletops. A fancy dining room sits adjacent, seemingly more for show than for use. It is the descent down the short staircase that transports you and makes you forget that you’re in Long Branch in the 21st century.
The sloped ceiling above the stairs is concave and even Ralph, at no more than five-and-a-half feet tall, needs to bend awkwardly to fit beneath. A sign above deters creationists from entering.
The room resembles a typical cellar; a low-hanging ceiling, concrete floor, an exposed wooden slat or two, and the temperature is noticeably cool. But then there are the dozens of glass cases which house hundreds of fossils, classified taxonomically, which means according to biological groups. Thousands more reside in organized drawers.
This collection began around 1970 when Ralph was in college and he organized the Monmouth Amateur Paleontological Society (MAPS). The specimens are the fruits of the group’s laborious dedication to excavating, digging, preparing, and preserving these prehistoric fragments.
“It’s the adventure, the challenge of finding things that not everyone else can find. Just the fact that you can hold something that was alive 75 million years ago is a fascination in and of itself,” said Ralph with genuine awe. However, his fascination with paleontology began years before MAPS’ conception.
Ralph’s fascination with dinosaurs and fossils arose when he was four years old, but at the age of eleven, local college students inflamed his interest and paved a way for what would become his life’s passion. The mother of a neighborhood friend was boarding science students from what is now the University. For an Earth Science class, the students dug for fossils in a local riverbed and gave young Ralph two of their finds. “If someone had given me a lump of gold, it couldn’t have made me any happier.”
Ralph still has these two fossils; they sit in a mini frame on the desk where he catalogues every new addition to the MAPS collection. On the same desk is a typewriter (“Our label maker, it is very high tech”) and a pin that reads ‘Living Fossil.’ “I like keeping things old-fashioned and quaint,” said the aging fossil enthusiast. “That’s how it started here, and it works.”
In his teens and during the early years of MAPS, Ralph was a diehard digger. He and friends would go out nearly every weekend throughout the year, breaking ice in streams to dig when the temperature was below freezing. While he doesn’t go out quite as frequently, he would still be considered an avid digger (in fact, one month before publication Ralph moved nearly two tons of dirt in search of a fossil). Now, just like years ago, Ralph does it for the adventure. He tells tales about narrowly escaping the caving in of riverbank walls, dodging angry snorting bulls, battling swarms of outraged bees, and pacifying angry homeowners with shotguns after honest misunderstandings regarding property lines.
MAPS continues to selectively add fossils to the collection, but because of the immense collection, they only add new species or those that are better preserved than what they already have. Even as the collection stands today, MAPS has much to be proud of.
Carl Mehling, decade-long MAPS member and the collections coordinator for reptile, amphibian, and bird fossils at the Museum of Natural History in New York, is impressed by the care that Ralph gives the specimens. “He has the definitive collection for the Atlantic Coastal Plain, and he arranges and cares for it just like a museum collection is taken care of,” explained Mehling. “He has things that are so fragile; most people would bulldoze it blindly, or not process it the right way, but not him.”
Johnson is clearly proud of the MAPS collection he so passionately tends to, and with good reason. “Even museums don’t have a collection like this,” said the amateur paleontologist, who by day works as a park ranger with the Monmouth County Park System. “When people are looking to do research on cretaceous fossils of New Jersey or the Atlantic Coastal Plain, places like the NJ State Museum and the Museum of Natural History in New York, they use us as a resource,” he continued proudly. “This is the premier collection.” Mehlingconfirms, “Everyone refers [interested researchers] to Ralph.”
The study of fossils is still vital today, even though everything being studied is long dead, or even extinct. “Basically, we can study all the living things that are on earth today,” explains Mehling, “but you need the temporal [researching the past] aspect of study to see the whole picture. The fossil record illuminates big shifts like mass extinctions and environmental changes which are some things that we really have to look at today.”
If it’s taken advantage of, the scientific potential of the MAPS collection is immeasurable. John Morano, Professor of Journalism at the University and author of the Morano Eco- Adventure Book Series, is also a MAPS member and has been digging for fifteen years. He is disappointed that students and faculty don’t take enough advantage of the collection. “This opportunity is one that doesn’t exist for most universities on the planet, and we have it right here, almost steps from campus,” he said. He also added, “I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve learned from Ralph about collecting, documenting, preserving and appreciating this fossil legacy.”
Encouraging appreciation for the study is one of Johnson’s talents, as his enthusiasm remains as palpable as the clay that surrounds his beloved fossils. Once he starts talking about anything cretaceous, his speech quickens and he moves excitedly from drawer to specimen to photograph, telling anecdotes of his experiences in paleontological time travel. “We are just the most recent players on a very, very ancient stage and paleontology is sort of a time machine that allows you to travel back and visit the players that came long before you.”
If Johnson’s own ardor for the study of fossils isn’t enough to prove his devotion, his hope for MAPS’ legacy is. “By itself, a fossil is absolutely nothing. It’s a lump of semi-consolidated sediment; a piece of dirt. It is nothing. The magic happens when the fossil interfaces with the human mind. At that moment, the fossil lives again.”
PHOTO COURTESY of Bob Badger
