The Pokémon Company has revealed that the Pokémon Fossil Museum, a travelling exhibit of Pokémon skeletons and fossils for pudding paleontologists, will be leaving Japan for the first time in 2026.
The first exhibit to debut outside of Japan will be at Chicago’s Field Museum in Illinois, and is due to open on 22nd May 2026. That gives you a full year to start saving up to visit.
The exhibit is a mix of real, “life-size” replicas of Pokémon skeletons and comparisons to real fossils. It’ll be up to aspiring researchers to spot similarities and differences between the likes of SUE the T.rex and Tyrantrum or the Archaeopteryx and Archeops. In other words, it’s a great way to see how real animals, alive and extinct, serve as inspirations for our favourite Pokémon.
The exhibit has been going since 2021 and has been travelling all across Japan since its debut, so it’s fantastic to see it finally heading abroad. No end date has been announced yet, but in Japan, the exhibit typically stays around between 1-4 months.
If you want to get a sense of what it will look like, you can check out a virtual recreation of the exhibit at Matterport Discover (via Serebii). Or you can watch the below video from PkmnKuriru, who got to visit one of the exhibits in 2022.
It’s worth noting that every single exhibit has some slight differences, so what you see in Chicago next year could be pretty different to what was on display in the Hofu Science Museum “Solar” or the Niigata Science Museum.
In Japan, at least, there was a lot of exclusive merchandise to pick up while the exhibit was ongoing, so we’ll have to wait and see if the North American version will have the same.
Will you be planning a trip to Chicago next May? Let us know if you’ve managed to visit any of the exhibits in Japan in the comments.
