New Jersey

New Jersey's Cretaceous stream sites — Big Brook, Poricy Brook, Ramanessin Brook and others in Monmouth County — are the East Coast's shark-tooth and belemnite classics. Big Brook Preserve in Colts Neck is a township park with an ordinance (Chapter 177, Article VII) that sets the rules: no more than five fossils per person per day; trowels with a blade no longer than six inches and screens no larger than 18 inches square; collecting only within the stream waterline, with digging into the stream banks above the waterline prohibited. Monmouth County Park System supplements those rules on its own stretches.

Poricy Park in Middletown allows collecting in the brook on the same principle (stream gravels only, hand tools, no bank digging) under the park's rules. Elsewhere the streams run through private property and the general rule applies: the landowner owns the bank and the bed of a non-navigable stream, so permission is required.

The Inversand (Rowan) marl pit at Sewell is now the Edelman Fossil Park of Rowan University: collecting is by organised event only and finds may be kept subject to the park's rules. New Jersey State Parks and Forests prohibit removal of natural resources; the New Jersey State Museum runs the state's paleontology programme and will identify finds.

Sale of Big Brook material is not addressed by the ordinance; the five-a-day limit and the recreational purpose make it a personal-collection site, and that is how the record should describe it.