Get Antique Roadshow-Style Identification Of Your Artifacts On UWS

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Found a pottery chip in your Brooklyn backyard or a shark tooth in the Hamptons?

Bring your own artifacts and have them identified by a professional this Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History's annual EarthFest, a day-long celebration of the planet.

EarthFest will include several family-friendly hands-on activities, ranging from botanical arts and crafts to stations that digitally transform you into a shark, museum officials said.

However, the event's centerpiece will be the identification stations, where visitors can bring in any artifact or specimen they have found, Antiques Roadshow-style, and have a museum expert help identify it, a spokesperson for the museum said.

The inspiration behind the identification stations comes from Identification Day, a long-running event that started at the museum in 1979 and ended in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Over the decades, some truly amazing discoveries have been made at the Museum through this activity, including a 3,000-year-old hand axe found in a Staten Island backyard, fossilized dinosaur tracks from a slab of rock in Massachusetts, a 72-million-year-old shark tooth discovered in New Jersey and a Pleistocene-era fossil walrus skull that washed up on a Virginia beach, according to museum officials.

With the exception of insects, the museum asks visitors not to bring any living or dead animals.

“The magic of EarthFest is that it spreads awareness and teaches visitors about the importance of local and global environments alike through hands-on activities for visitors of all ages,” Jackie Handy, director of Public Programs for the museum, said. “A common thread throughout all of the Museum’s programs is calling on everyone to learn more about the natural world and strive to make a difference together. You don’t have to be employed as a scientist to participate in science and you don’t have to be a researcher to investigate ways to help conserve the planet. EarthFest calls us all in to ask questions, explore new ideas, and celebrate the wonder that is our city, our country, and our world.”

Learn more about EarthFest here.

For questions and tips, email Miranda.Levingston@Patch.com.