School life / Student campaigns, 1987 & 2017
The Lobbyists Wore Papier-Mâché Dinosaur Heads
In 2017, Connecticut students made a music video to get Dilophosaurus named the state dinosaur. Thirty years earlier, Wyoming fifth graders lobbied for a fossil fish and nearly lost it to a rattlesnake.
On March 20, 2017, a committee of the Connecticut General Assembly heard testimony on a bill to make Dilophosaurus the state dinosaur. Students from Rocky Hill testified. An eighth grader from Griswold Middle School described the campaign: students had researched pictures of the dinosaur, made papier-mâché heads, mixed paint for realistic colors, and sung and choreographed a parody of the 1980s song "Walk the Dinosaur."
"It was really fun to wear a suit to school and dance around into the Dilophosaurus head," he told the committee, "especially when we got to scare our principal." The transcript records laughter.
He said this to legislators. Under oath, or close enough.
The case had evidence. Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill preserves about 2,000 three-toed tracks believed to have been made by Dilophosaurus. No bones have been found in Connecticut. The General Assembly made it the state dinosaur in 2017.
In Cheyenne, Wyoming, the 1987 version was a fish. Frank Miller, a fifth-grade teacher at Anderson Elementary, and a colleague, Maudie Barker, ran a Fossil Club. At the end of each school year, he later recalled, Barker would fill his truck bed with fossils, he would hide them in the prairie behind the school, and the children would go out and discover them.
Barker decided the club should get the legislature to name a state fossil: Knightia, an extinct fish named after Wyoming's first state geologist. The bill failed the first year. The second year, the club went to the Capitol for the final reading. They were told that if they talked or made noise, they would be removed. They sat in the balcony, silent, and watched legislators add an amendment to make the state fossil the rattlesnake instead.
It was a demonstration of how a bill can change on the floor. "What they decided to do was exemplary," Miller said, "but it scared my students to death." The amendment failed. The bill passed. Legislators later asked why the children hadn't cheered. Miller explained the warning about noise, and they laughed. The children cheered on the bus, all the way back to school.
Every government should have to explain itself, at least once, to a fifth grader in a balcony.
The youngest is currently lobbying our household for a state animal. Her candidate is a hamster. The opposition, my wife, has proposed an amendment: no animal. Last night the youngest made a hamster head out of a paper bag and danced in the kitchen. The middle one filmed it. My wife laughed.
The bill is in committee. The youngest is very hopeful.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Connecticut General Assembly, GAE hearing transcript, March20,2017 cga.ct.gov
- Wyoming State Geological Survey, February16,2017: How Knightia Became the Wyoming State Fossil content.govdelivery.com
- Connecticut Secretary of the State: Sites, Seals, Symbols, State Dinosaur portal.ct.gov