New Hampshire doesn't have an official state fossil. I'm thinking of nominating myself.

Until one day last week, when I found myself watching some sort of dinosaur train show with a grandkid, I didn't even know there were such things as state fossils.

Wait, on second thought, that may disqualify me from consideration for the post. I'm an old guy, which is half the battle. And I know a lot of trivia about New Hampshire -- enough to know there is no official fossil. But I'm kind of bummed that I didn't know other states had them.

In fact, one Web list I saw tallied 40 states with official fossils. And that included every state in New England except us and Rhode Island, which has Buddy Cianci, Brad Faxon and Providence College and is thus probably too small to hold anything else.

But if these other New England states had dinosaurs stomping around them, I thought, how could they have failed to set large, scaly feet in the Granite State at some point in the Pleistocene, Listerine or kerosene eras? After a bit more research, though, I poked a few holes in these other states' fossil claims.

Massachusetts, for instance, couldn't find any relic from an actual dinosaur roaming around Fenway Park or Sturbridge Village or the Kennedy compound. So its official fossil is a "dinosaur track." And not even a particular species either, but a "generic" track.

Again, I ask you, would a dinosaur set foot in Taxachusetts and skip New Hampshire?

Vermont actually had a fossil, at least. But not unlike the snooty crowd from New York that has overrun parts of it, the Green Mountain State's fossil is the beluga whale. Why they just didn't go for the beluga caviar and give up the pretense, I don't know.

Out West is where the dinosaurs really roamed, of course. So in Colorado you find the official state fossil is the Jurassic dinosaur. California has the way-cool saber tooth cat, a distant cousin, I believe, to my late, lamented Ed the Cat, which regularly bit the hands that fed it.

But all Arizona could come up with was a piece of petrified wood, which it no doubt found when Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis were filming the "Petrified Forest" movie.

If some enterprising New Hampshire fourth-grade class hasn't gotten around to it by the time the grandson gets there, I'm sure I'll have the lad pushing for a state fossil. Right now, I'm trying to teach him to say "Aflac!" when he is asked what sound a duck makes.

Say, I wonder if a Fritz Wetherbee footprint would qualify as our state fossil?

Write to Joe McQuaid at publisher@unionleader.com.