you know how IRL scientists are always ready to throw hands over certain topics? what I want to know is what kind of stupid arguments Pokemon scientists get into fights over. a heated battle starts in the middle of a conference because someone asked if Slowking’s Shellder could be considered its own separate species or not
*scientist steps onto the stage*
*a photo of a Flygon appears on the projector screen*
*she hits the screen with a pointer stick*
“Bug.”
*entire auditorium erupts into furious shouting*
DEFINITELY BUG
I should clarify I agree that this would be a debate in canon because it is in the fandom, however, flygon is a reptile c:
what dose that make trapinch
Trapinch is inspired by an antlion, but instead of insect anatomy with huge mandibles, Trapinch is a turtle-like reptilian beast.
Flygon is modeled after an adult antlion, NOT a “dragonfly” by the way, which isn’t even an insect name that exists in Japanese.
Vibrava is clearly insectoid, true, but when we look at flygon:
Flygon is literally modeled like a “dinosaur,” it has no segmentation but has stripes on its tail evocative of such. It has false “bug eye” goggles and it’s “antennae” are just horns.
While pokemon exhibit a wild degree of stylization, ALL bug pokemon based on actual arthropods have at least some degree of unmistakably chitinous physiology:
The trapinch line are to “bugs” as dolphins are to sharks. They are bug-like only by evolutionary convergence. It is not an oversight that they aren’t bug type, but deliberately integrated into their designs that they “mimic” bug type.
Trapinch, Vibrava, and Flygon all definitely share a different darwinian evolutionary relationship. Trapinch and Flygon are, as bogleech says, members of a reptilian and dragon clade. This is supported by morphology, since Flygon is closest to Dragonite in body-shape and Trapinch could be either a lizard, turtle, or some other sort of reptile pokemon. Vibrava is, however, most closely resembles bug-types with its two pairs of wings, segmented body, and twig-like bent legs.
Taking into account the theory linked above, the differences between the three make sense. They are all separate species that developed a (pokemon) evolutionary relationship and have slowly (darwinianly) evolved to be closer to one another. Rather than evolving perfectly to suite the ancestral bug-like condition of Vibrava or the purely dragon-like condition of Flygon, they meet in the middle. Flygon evolves head structures mimicking Vibrava’s antennae and similarly diamond-shaped wings, Vibrava secondarily loses its Bug-typing and slowly starts “unsegmenting”. And then Trapinch does its own thing, like in real antlions.
Perhaps Vibrava was a prey animal of some sort to the ancestral Trapinch whose genetics were integrated into its predator via HGT?
