00:00Have you ever been playing Pokemon Sword or Shield and wondered, these fossil Pokemon?
00:05What's their deal? Fossil Pokemon, our favourite cartoon
00:08idolisations of long-lost prehistoric critters, have been a staple of the franchise since
00:12Generation 1. Kabuto, Omanyte, and of course Aerodactyl kicking off the long-running trend.
00:18Generations 3, 4, 5, and 6 each added to Pokemon's prehistory. But then in Gen 8,
00:24things got a little weird. As we all know, Galar is based on Great Britain, which has an interesting
00:31history with paleontology. In the late 1800s, the British Empire saw a boom in paleontological
00:37sciences, as it competed with America and other nations to host the leading institutions in the
00:43field. America in particular would come to know this period as the Bone Wars. Don't laugh.
00:48To be clear, paleontology as a science is based on educated guesses, but during this period,
00:54these guesses were pretty out there. The best examples of this are in Crystal Palace London
01:00and their infamous Iguanodons. When fossils were first discovered of bony protrusions,
01:05again, don't laugh, they were first assumed to be a horn, as seen on these statues. But later
01:11evidence in fact suggested these were actually thumb spikes, used for defence and foraging.
01:16There are so many other examples of early paleontologists just slapping together fossils from what would
01:22later be revealed to be different species and creating utter monstrosities as a result.
01:27Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it?
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