Fourth Graders Fight to Make the Mastodon New Hampshire's State Fossil

Over the past year, New Hampshire legislators have listened to a lot of tiny voices trying to make a big change to the state’s symbols.

A group of fourth-graders at Kearsarge Regional Elementary School in Bradford have been lobbying hard for state politicians to consider establishing an official state fossil.

Their choice: the giant mastodon.

The kids started their fight for the mastodon in Mr. Thom Smith’s third-grade class. After a lesson about fossils in the fall of the 2013-2014 school year, many of the students were shocked that New Hampshire does not have an official state fossil, Smith wrote in a class blog. So they were determined to figure out why.

Smith sought advice from a professor at the University of New Hampshire and one at Dartmouth. He learned that not many fossils are found in New Hampshire, due to all the granite in the state. Granite is an igneous rock which doesn’t preserve bones very well.

The professors did tell Smith, however, that some mammoth, mastodon and brachiopod fossils have been found in the state, including an 11,000-year-old mastodon tooth found off the coast of Rye, NH in 2013.

Mr. Smith gave his class the choice, and they almost unanimously decided the mastodon should become New Hampshire’s state fossil.

Since then, Mr. Smith and the class contacted state representatives and other legislators in the state and heard back from state representatives David Borden and Tom Sherman who both agreed to sponsor a bill.

Representatives Borden and Sherman have helped the kids through the process of writing a bill, meeting with legislators and writing letters to lawmakers, according to The Concord Monitor.

“It has been really cool,” Smith told Seacoast Online. “The kids can’t believe what’s happening, that they can make a difference.”

The bill is currently in committee and should be voted on this year.

Image via Ryan Somma, Wikimedia

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