Satoshi Tajiri spent countless hours as a boy hunting for beetles, crawfish, toads, and other creatures near his home, just outside of Tokyo -- so much so that he dreamed of one day becoming an entomologist. But as his neighborhood became more developed, he, like many modern kids, began spending more time indoors than exploring rice paddies, rivers, and forests. And that's when he discovered his second love: video games.
Tajiri merged his passion for studying and collecting little creatures with the gaming world by creating a game called Pocket Monsters, or Pokémon, which would go on to become the highest-grossing media franchise of all time across its video games, trading cards, and other licensed merchandise.
Now the Pokémon Company is returning to those roots with the "Pokémon Fossil Museum," an exhibit that merges real-life paleontology with Pokémon lore. It opened earlier this year at the Field Museum in Chicago and was adapted from a similar exhibit created by Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science in collaboration with The Pokémon Company.
The exhibit displays sculptures of Pokémon "fossils" — figures depicting the imagined skeletons of fictional prehistoric Pokémon — alongside real or replica fossils with similar features from the Field's collection. The underbelly shell of a prehistoric turtle, some 80 million years old, sits next to a cast of Tirtouga, the ancestor of modern turtle Pokémon. A cast of the skull of local celebrity Sue the T. rex sits next to a model of a Tyrantrum Pokémon. And around the corner from a giant Archeops Pokémon, visitors come face to face with the Chicago Archaeopteryx, which is only the 13th fossil of its kind ever discovered.
"You could see a T. rex skull right next to the big T. rex Pokémon and it was just like, 'this looks super similar!'" said Deacon Woodard, a 13-year-old from Washington, D.C. "You can kind of see where the inspiration from the Pokémon went into, or the inspiration from the real animal went into the Pokémon."
Visitors are guided through the exhibit by Pokémon professor-guides — cartoon likenesses created by Pokémon artists of actual Field Museum scientists.
"It's a little bit of a surreal experience," Arjan Mann, an assistant curator who helped adapt the exhibit for a U.S. audience, said of his Pokémon doppelganger. "My girlfriend's sisters have taken that Pokémonified version of me and made stickers and put them everywhere. It's becoming out of control."
Mann said it has been great to see the exhibit attracting scores of new visitors to the museum.
"The ability for a natural history museum to pair with a pop culture brand like Pokémon allows us to springboard our fossils and science to audiences that it would never have reached before."
The final section of the exhibit encourages visitors to go outside and continue making new discoveries in the natural world by fossil hunting, birdwatching, or, like Pokémon's creator, collecting insects.
Mann spends a lot of his time working at the Mazon Creek fossil beds outside of Chicago, collecting new specimens alongside both professional and amateur fossil hunters, some of whom have made major contributions to scientific advancement.
He pointed to a recent paper in the journal Science on the origin of tetrapod development. "Almost every fossil in the publication came from an avocational paleontologist," he said. "They are professionals in their own right."
The Pokémon Fossil Museum runs at the Field Museum through April 11, 2027.
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