Five states— Alaska, Michigan, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Washington—picked mammoths or mastodons, those trunked and tusked relatives of elephants. Nebraska was first, on its 100th birthday in 1967. It has a strong claim: it was home to three species of mammoth, a pair of battling mammoths that died with tusks locked in combat, and the world’s largest mammoth fossil, Archie. (Discovered by chickens, Archie was later immortalized in a life-size statue that University of Nebraska students hi-five for luck.)

Brett Neilsen / Flickr

South Carolina was the latest state to join Team Mammoth, and not without some difficulty. Chagrined by the state’s lack of an official fossil, 8-year-old paleo-enthusiast Olivia McConnell wrote to local lawmakers, nominating the Columbia mammoth. Their bill was delayed for months by creationist senators, who wanted to include amendments that referred to the book of Genesis, but eventually passed in May 2014. (McConnell has since written a book about her experience.)

Vermont’s state fossil—please, no Bernie jokes—is the only one that belongs to an animal that still lives: the white beluga whale. “Charlotte” was found by railroad workers in 1849, in a farmer’s field, some 200 miles and two mountain ranges away from the nearest ocean. Her existence helped to show that New England was once covered in glaciers, whose retreat allowed the Atlantic to flood the area with marine water. Having reshaped our understanding of geology, Charlotte later survived fire and flood, and was named as Vermont’s state fossil in 1993. (She was later demoted to state marine fossil, while a mammoth tooth took the terrestrial spot.)

Some strayed outside the animal kingdom. Arizona picked a conifer tree that thrived over 200 million years ago; its massive trunks have since swapped brown wood for rainbow-colored rock, and can be found in the Petrified Forest National Monument. Louisiana, North Dakota, Texas, and Washington went in a similar direction with petrified wood from other trees.

Maine’s state fossil, a primitive plant called Pertica, lived around 400 million years ago when animals and plants began colonizing the land in earnest. At 3 meters tall, it would have been one of the tallest things on the planet, but was later dwarfed by far loftier species like the 45-meter dawn redwood—Oregon’s state fossil. The redwood’s an odd choice, since a few thousand living individuals were found in China in 1944, and seeds have since been distributed throughout the world. And since Oregon only designated the redwood as their chosen fossil in 2005, they can’t even claim that they heard of it before anyone else.

Still, their choice makes loads of sense compared to Georgia, which picked the shark tooth. Not the tooth of any particular species or genus of shark, like the monstrous megalodon, as chosen by North Carolina. Nope, just a generic “shark tooth.” That’s like picking “dinosaur leg” as your state fossil, or “bird” as your state animal. It’s even worse because shark jaws are conveyor belts that continually jettison old teeth, and so fossil teeth are extremely common. Georgia is the kid that didn’t really understand the assignment. (Kentucky was even less specific when it chose brachiopods, a large group of animals that look like clams but aren’t; that’s like choosing “molluscs” or “back-boned animals”.)

At least Georgia and Kentucky are in the game. Seven states have so far failed to choose a state fossil altogether. It feels churlish to shame them, but let’s say that their names rhyme with Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.

Florida narrowly escaped this fate by designating agatized coral as the official state stone, and thus accidentally getting a state fossil in the process. Good work, Florida Man.

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