TJ Mascots

Terri the Terri-dactyl soars above Trader Joe's Clifton, New Jersey on Allwood Road — wings spread wide in her tropical Hawaiian shirt, hanging from the ceiling with her Trader Joe's name tag. The dino theme is a deeper New Jersey deep-cut than you might expect: NJ is the official Dinosaur State, home of the famous Hadrosaurus discovery in Haddonfield in 1858 (the first nearly-complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in North America). And during the Late Cretaceous, this whole stretch of what's now northern Jersey was coastal terrain where pterosaurs really did glide overhead — so Terri the Pterodactyl gracing the Clifton TJ's is a tribute to a long line of local Terri-dactyls who came before her, 70 million years ago.