You can’t see this fossil until 2019, but there will be others you can see. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Hold on to your butts, readers, because I’m about to unleash a lot of Jurassic Park puns. Tomorrow, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will celebrate the fifth annual National Fossil Day with a series of public programs.

Things will kick off tomorrow with a ceremony in the Museum’s rotunda hosted by Sant Director Kirk Johnson and will feature a host of geologists and paleontologists: National Park Service senior geologist and paleontologist Vincent Santucci; retired senior paleontologist from the Bureau of Land Management Lucy Kuizon; and National Paleontology Program coordinator at the U.S. Forest Service Michael Fracasso.

Following the ceremony, there will be fossil-related activities happening at the Museum’s Q?rius education center. They’re mostly for kids, but don’t lie and pretend that you don’t want to play hooky from work and dig for fossils. Here’s what’s going down:

• Sifting for Fossils – Take on the role of a paleontologist by searching through sand to find and identify marine fossils.
• Ask a Paleontologist – Talk with museum and U. S. Geological Survey scientists about their research and what it’s like to be a paleontologist.
• Fossil Illustration – Work with scientific illustrators to learn how to draw fossils and reconstruct ancient plants and animals using fossil evidence.
• Paleo Art: Fossil Rubbings – Become a scientific illustrator and make your own fossil rubbings of ancient trilobites, shells and plants to take home.
• Shark!! – Explore a variety of fossil shark teeth and learn more about the early history of sharks.
• FossiLab – Learn how specialists extract fossils from rock, sift microfossils from gravel and sand, and rebuild fossils found in many pieces.
• Explore the Q?rius Fossil Collection – Q?rius has hundreds of fossils that visitors can handle. From dinosaurs to trilobites, sharks, and ancient plants and insects, the Q? collection will take you around the world and through time.

Of course, one notable absence tomorrow will be the National Fossil Hall, which closed last spring so the Museum can assemble the Nation’s T. Rex skeleton and renovate the famed hall. That’s scheduled to reopen in 2019. But maybe sooner because life, uh, finds a way.