Pokémon Fossil Museum

One of the coolest things about the Field Museum is their Pokémon Fossil Museum which was part of a Pokemon event in Chicago. The problem was getting tickets for it. When we first checked online, the tickets were sold out for months. So, we got regular tickets to the Field Museum instead because there were still tons of cool exhibits to see. The day before our actual Field Museum ticket day, though, we went over to the museum along the beautiful lake path. In Pokémon GO, there is a special Pikachu wearing an excavator costume that you could only catch a certain number of times each day, and I wanted to catch as many as possible. I could only catch it if I am physically at the museum. While we were standing on the steps in front of the museum, we decided to drop in and ask if they had any Pokémon Fossil Museum tickets available in person. Shockingly, they had a few tickets for the last entry time the next day! We were so excited and bought the tickets immediately. 

I have played Pokemon Go for almost six years, so getting a Pokémon that was exclusive to the museum made the visit feel even more special. The amount of details in the game were amazing because there were Rock-type and fossil-related Pokémon spawning around the Field Museum that appeared inside the exhibit as skeleton models. As soon as I opened the game up, Pokemon like Kabuto, Archeops, Aerodactyl, and more spawned everywhere. When I went into the exhibit, I saw models of those Pokemon’s fossils. Having the experience be both in game and in real life was amazing. 

The exhibit also did a really good job connecting Pokémon to actual paleontology. Instead of only displaying Pokémon models, it compared them with the prehistoric animals that influenced their designs. Kabuto, for example, has features similar to horseshoe crabs and other ancient arthropods. Archeops is connected to Archaeopteryx, an early feathered dinosaur with features associated with both non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds. I also liked that the exhibit treated the Pokémon almost as if they were real organisms. Their skeletons were displayed like actual fossils. A Pokémon design normally just looks like a cool creature, but putting its skeleton beside a real fossil encourages you to think about why its body has that shape and what kind of animal could have inspired it.

I went to the exhibit because I was excited about Pokémon, but what surprised me was how naturally the real paleontology fit into it. The Pokémon made me pay closer attention to the fossils, and the fossils made me notice details in Pokémon I had seen for years without thinking much about where their designs came from.