A dino-mite bill honoring the discovery of a dinosaur fossil in the San Juan Islands and the efforts of local students could create a new Washington state symbol.
In May 2012, Burke Museum paleontologists discovered a portion of a dinosaur’s left femur on the shores of Sucia Island State Park.
The fossil belonged to a Suciasaurus rex — a theropod, a two-legged, meat-eating dinosaur like the Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds, according to the museum.
After extensive research on the dinosaur discovery and the legislative process, a fourth-grade class at Elmhurst Elementary in Parkland brought the proposal of a state dinosaur to Rep. Melanie Morgan, D-Parkland, in 2019.
“We’ve been trying to get this thing passed every year since then,” she said.
House Bill 1020, sponsored by Morgan, cleared the state Legislature this week. If Gov. Jay Inslee signs the bill, the Suciasaurus rex will become the state dinosaur of Washington.
About 80 million years ago, the Suciasaurus rex was a dinosaur that lived somewhere between Baja California, Mexico and northern California, according to research associates at the Burke Museum.
These dinosaur’s bones — which settled into the seafloor after its carcass was washed out to sea — traveled up to Washington when a portion of the western edge of North America was displaced to British Columbia in the Late Cretaceous period.
Because the fossil is incomplete, paleontologists were unable to identify the exact family or species the bone belongs to, so they nicknamed it the Suciasaurus rex to honor Sucia Island State Park.
It is the first and only dinosaur found in Washington. The discovery was improbable because of Washington’s proximity to an active tectonic plate, high degree of human development and the fact that much of the state was underwater when dinosaurs roamed the earth 240 to 66 million years ago, museum research associates said.
“The beauty about this piece of legislation is it’s not just about a state dinosaur,” Morgan said, “but truly it’s about civic engagement from our youth, as they have stuck with me from the very beginning till it’s passing today.”
The students shared their research with lawmakers this session and what the bill meant to them, Morgan said, “and they just kept testifying over the years. The other beautiful thing is we had other school districts chiming in to testify at our committee hearings as well.”
The students in the fourth-grade class are from Morgan’s district, which has low voter engagement, an 80% poverty rate and “struggling schools, including Elmhurst Elementary,” Morgan said in a news release.
Morgan, a single mother of four children, was once a school board director in the Franklin Pierce School District, “so children are my heart, my focus. Pretty much all these legislations I make today is really for them,” she said.
“Some here on campus may look at this bill as being silly and a waste of the state Legislature’s time,” Morgan said, “but we are continuing to put people first. Those people are not just adults, but they are the youth as well … It’s their bill.”
The Suciasaurus rex will join Washington’s lineup of state symbols, including a state flower, a state fruit, a state dance and a recently designated state sport. Washington will join twelve other states and the District of Columbia in designating an official dinosaur.
