>>53849227>reconstructions still were reconstructed to resemble plausable organisms, because that's what the entire fucking goal was, they just got mixed up on what was what.I also have an interest in paleontology (no formal studies, but I do find the practice interesting) and think this is disigenuous. You inherently have to go farther with the concept in terms of Pokemon because a fuckton of ones that exist right now have traits mashed from different animals (The Nidoking line is a pretty good example of this) on TOP of there already being a designated chimera mon introduce the gen before. If they had gone with any of those numerous "what if they looked perfectly normal lol" fan redesign approaches the entire point would've been lost because they just end up being glorified normal mons that have a goofy backstory, in which case why not just make them normal cartoon animals like most other fossils and be done with it.
Pokemon's really like that on the whole they tke concepts from actual natural sciences and blow the fuck out of them re a whimsical feel. Evolution is an obvious example, but their more recent take on Convergent Evolution also fits this-in no instsnce in our world would a jellyfish and mushroom evolve similar function, but it's entirely reasonable that it could happen in a world where there were living mushroom creatures walking about as a common occurence.
This isn't to say I'm 10% on the execution of all of them (Arctovish is a boring as fuck design and it's mishmash nature feels like an afterthought because they realized the arcto- body and vish- head had too similar a color scheme), but I much prefer what we got over the alternatives.
