{"id":20861,"date":"2025-03-28T10:19:20","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T14:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=20861"},"modified":"2025-03-28T10:19:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T14:19:20","slug":"digging-deep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/digging-deep\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging Deep"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At Monmouth, curiosity doesn\u2019t stop at the classroom door. Cases in point: Associate Professor of English Stanley Blair (above left) and Professor of Journalism John Morano, two scholars whose research interests have taken them deep into the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blair, a literary historian with a love of New Jersey folklore, recently found a 19th-century map that revealed where a mastodon skeleton was unearthed in Ocean Township, New Jersey, in 1823. The story of the skeleton and its untimely fate had been lost to history\u2014until Blair retraced it through forgotten journals and archives.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morano, meanwhile, enjoys fossil hunting, a pursuit befitting the author of eco-adventure novels. His latest find? Rare 65-million-year-old turtle fossils, pulled from a creek in western Monmouth County. Morano donated them to the New Jersey State Museum<\/a>, where they\u2019re helping scientists understand ancient ecosystems\u2014and perhaps even climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together, Blair and Morano\u2019s work underscores the boundless curiosity that defines scholarship. It also serves as a reminder that history isn\u2019t buried\u2014it\u2019s just waiting for the right pair of hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professors Stanley Blair and John Morano take scholarship off the page and into the field, unearthing stories both historic and prehistoric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":20865,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents"],"thumbnail":"\"\"","catString":"Currents","issue":"Spring 2025","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20861"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21010,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20861\/revisions\/21010"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}