By Carla Astudillo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Millions of years before the New Jersey Turnpike and the Wawas, New Jersey looked quite different.

Back then, the Jersey Shore belonged to prehistoric snails, mollusks and burrowing shrimp while dinosaurs roamed the Palisades.

In fact, the Garden State has one of the longest geological histories of any state in the United States with rocks going back more than 500 million years, according to Dana Ehret, assistant curator of Natural History at the New Jersey State Museum.

That’s due mostly to the fact that the fossil-bearing rocks and sediments found in New Jersey are closer to surface and more likely to be exposed.

“A lot of the material is more exposed thus making it easier to study and collect,” said Ehret.

A tool from The Dinosaur Database can let you search your address and show you what your home would have looked like millions of years ago. The interactive globe lets you go from epoch to epoch where you can see how Earth's (and New Jersey's landmass) has changed as far back as 750 million years ago.

Below, we will use the tool to go back through time and look at prehistoric New Jersey, which is represented by the pink dot.

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Ediacarian Period (About 600 million years ago)

New Jersey, at this time, was underwater and sea life was evolving with the advent of complex multicellular organisms. Most of the underwater creatures were soft-bodied life-forms that did not fossilize well.

The fossilized remains of colonies of ancient cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) were found in the 1.2 billion-year-old Franklin Marble from the New Jersey Highlands.

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Cambrian Period (About 540-500 million years ago)

New Jersey, while still underwater, was a warm, shallow sea. The Cambrian period is marked by a diversity of sea animal life known as the “Cambrian explosion” when organisms began to evolve shells and exoskeletons. It was a quiet geological time for the Garden State but evidence of Olenus, an ancient extinct arthropod as well as vertical worm borrows were found in Cambrian formations of northwestern New Jersey.

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Carla Astudillo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Olenus, an ancient Cambrian extinct arthropod

via Wikipedia

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Silurian Period (About 430 million years ago)

After a mass extinction took place where nearly half of marine invertebrate species were wiped out, the first land plants began to emerge during this period. In New Jersey, the Silurian period was marked by uplifting and mountain building with streams flowing northwestward across northern New Jersey. The sea moved in and out where evidence of “sea scorpions” and ostracoderms (early fish) in northwestern New Jersey around the Delaware Water Gap.

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Permian Period (About 280 million years ago)

The Permian Period is marked by merging of all landmasses and the creation of the supercontinent Pangea. North America was going through significant uplift forming the Appalachian Mountains.

Not a lot of fossils in New Jersey have been found from the Permian period.

This may be, not because there was no life, but more likely, it was time of great erosion in New Jersey which could wash away the sediments that could preserve the organism, said Ehret.

However, fossils found elsewhere in the world suggest that during this time period, amphibious tetrapods and reptiles diversified among the plant life.

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Triassic Period (About 240-200 million years ago)

Another mass extinction, this time of land plants, led to significantly lower oxygen levels. Still, small ancestors to birds and mammals. The earliest dinosaurs also began to emerge as there is evidence footprints from New Jersey three-toed dinosaurs.

However, in New Jersey, it's the reptiles that have taken over. The Pangea supercontinent began to break apart forming the Newark Rift Basin in New Jersey, forming a large lake where crocodile-like phytosaurs and the horned lizard-like Hypsognathus lived. In the northeast tip of Bergen County near the New York border, a fossil skeleton was found of the Icarosaurus which was a small gliding reptile that resembles a moth.

The armored reptile Stegomus arcuatus jerseyensis was found in Triassic rocks in the Brunswick formation.

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Recreation of the Icarosaurus

via Wikipedia

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Jurassic Period (About 170-150 million years ago)

Cue the music.

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and primitive mammals and birds continued to evolve as the warm, humid climate formed lush jungles. It was a very active geological time for New Jersey as volcanic activity produced lava flows that formed the Watchung Mountains. Molten rock in basin sediments created the Palisades Sill.

Unfortunately, not a lot of specimens or fossils have been found in New Jersey from this era which Ehret attributes to another possible period of erosion.

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Cretaceous Period (About 120-66 million years ago)

Dinosaurs continued to evolve as modern mammal, bird and insect groups began to appear.

In New Jersey, fossilized remains of several late Cretaceous-era dinosaurs and reptiles have been found along a stretch of what used to be a shallow marine environment from Atlantic Highlands in Monmouth County, through Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington and Gloucester down to Salem County and present-day Delaware.

The green sand “marl” found along this stretch of shallow water was perfect for preserving fossils of cow sharks and mosasaurus, 50-foot extinct carnivorous aquatic lizards.

In addition, land-dwelling animals living near the oceans or rivers may have died and washed out into this area, said Ehret.

Dinosaurs of this epoch include the Dryptosaurus ("tearing reptile") a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex with relatively larger three-fingered hands and New Jersey's state dinosaur, the Hadrosaurus ("bulky lizard")–– a duckbilled bipedal 10-foot tall and peaceful vegetarian.

The heyday of the dinosaurs came crashing down, literally, as an asteroid impact on the present-day Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico drove all dinosaur species to extinction.

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Rendering of Hadrosaurus

via Wikipedia

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Paleogene Period (About 50-35 million years ago)

The dinosaurs were dead, but New Jersey life found a way.

Marine life, including sea snails, fish, sharks and burrowing shrimp, continued to flourish in South Jersey as there was extensive erosion of the upland areas in the north.

In addition, remains of the Diatryma, a seven-foot-tall bird that may or may have not been carnivorous have been found in New Jersey.

Elsewhere in the world, mammals like primates continued to evolve and diversify. Early whales evolved from land mammals.

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Diatrymus skeleton

via Wikipedia

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