>>50140705Chimecho is not supposed to be Hoenn native. As per my headcanon, Chimecho was supposed a Sinnoh Pokemon while Shellos/Gastrodon were supposed to be Hoenn, but they were swapped at the last second since there were too many Water/Ground types in Hoenn. The Chimecho line seems like a natural counterpart to the Bronzor line (both lines are Psychic-type idiophones that are commonly found in Mt. Coronet), while the colors of the West and East Sea Shellos forms reference the land and sea of Hoenn respectively. Chimecho appears dead last in the Gen III index number list (aside from the Unown forms B-Z), after even Deoxys, which seemingly corroborates this theory. They're also very common in Sinnoh but in Hoenn they are only found at the very top grass in Mt. Pyre with a 2% encounter rate. It's also likely the reason they gave it a pre-evolution in Gen 4 despite Chimecho being a shitmon that needed an evolution instead of a pre-evolution. It wasn't supposed to be a cross-gen, it's just that Chingling and Chimecho were both created at the same time and were probably the very first Pokemon created to be in Gen IV, before even Bonsly and Munchlax.
