The Pokemon Fossil Museum, an exhibition featuring real fossils as well as sculptures of fossil creatures found in the Pokemon games, opened at Chicago’s Field Museum Friday.
Its display at the Field Museum, first announced in May 2025, is the first time the exhibition has been put on outside Japan. It will be at the Field Museum through April 11, 2027, per the Pokemon Company website.
In addition to the Pokemon Company and the Field Museum, the exhibition also involves contributions from the Japan National Museum of Nature and Science. The exhibition first went on display in Japan in 2021 and toured across the country through April 2026.
The exhibition will encompass fossils in the Field Museum collection, including the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as “Sue” and the museum’s fossil of the ancient feather dinosaur Archaeopteryx, one of the earliest known precursors to today’s birds.
“This really truly is spanning the entirety of paleontology and our fossil natural history, so it will be representations of every type of fossil, even amber, in the exhibit,” Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum, told ABC News.
It will also include life-sized “cast” sculptures of fossil Pokemon from the company’s nine generations of games released between 1996 and 2025. The exhibition will use color coding to distinguish Pokemon from real fossils.
“It is 100% color-coded from the minute you walk in the door. One color is Pokémon, and another color indicates this is from the real world, and we repeat that throughout the whole exhibition. We even separated the text very specifically so that we’re not introducing confusion,” Anastasia DeMaio, an exhibitions developer at the Field Museum, told the Chicago Tribune.
In the games, players are able to find fossils and restore the fossilized creatures, including Pokemon’s take on trilobites, ammonites, pterodactyls, the Tyrannosaurus rex and Archaeopteryx.
“For more than 29 years, the Pokémon brand has been adored by fans around the world, stoking fascination and curiosity for the franchise’s many iconic Pokémon, their lore, and the unique world they inhabit … the Pokémon Fossil Museum will inspire visitors to make new discoveries about some of their favorite Pokémon while offering a pathway to science,” Jaap Hoogstraten, head of exhibitions at the Field Museum, said in a release in May 2025.
