Can you tell me what inspired this exhibition?

Yeah, so the exhibit was sort of the brainchild of this researcher in Japan named Daisuke Aiba, and he's a paleontologist that studies ammonites and other invertebrates.

I mean, he obviously is a Pokémon fan and had this idea to compare fossil pokemon in particular to their real world fossil influences and how natural history and science influence each other this exhibit a version of it originally was debuted in japan and we are adapting it for an american audience one north american audience i should say and making the content more relevant to North America by adding fossils from North America and fossils that are local also.

So showing off a bit of our own natural history in comparison to Pokemon.

The exhibit opens on May 22nd this year and runs through April next year in 2027.

So please come to Chicago and look at the Pokemon Fossil Museum exhibit.

You can get tickets now online.

That would be

Arjun?

Yeah, I think he touched on a lot of the same points, that its classification system is kind of like a weird parallel for Linnaean taxonomy and other systematic forms that we use in paleontology and other natural history forms.

And that indexing and collecting aspect of it is another thing that really jives with natural history collections and how we both get specimens and hunt for specimens and classify them.

So I do think that it is the gateway to this form of classification for so many kids.

Like, I knew how to classify Pokémon and what Pokémon were before I knew what the natural world was.

That's the, one of the first times in history probably kids are learning it in a different way to natural history, rather than, you know, collecting bugs first.

You know, my first collecting thing was Pokémon cards, [laughs] you know.

Can you tell me what inspired this exhibition?