This is amazing. But I'm a little puzzled as to why they change species upon evolution. Evolution in Pokemon is more like metamorphosis, so shouldn't the evolutions of Pokemon essentially be juvenile, adolescent, and adult forms of the same species?
Rayquaza Master, yes, I do agree with you, if Pokemon would exist in the real world, an entire evolution line would be a species, since pokemon evolution is, as you said, more like metamorphosis. In real life, the monarch caterpillar is Danaus plexippus, and the monarch butterfly is Danaus plexippus... same species. I mentioned something about this in the main post... literally this: "Pokemon in the same evolutionary family are in the same genus, keep that in mind (I know that in real life they should be threated as the same species, but this mechanism does not seem to apply to the pokemon worlds, so lets keep em this way)". When I say this does not seem to apply, is because it has been mentioned by official sources that "there are 150 different species of Pokemon(way back in gen 1)". Official sources seem to forget about the real life species concept, and also seem to forget about the metamorphosis issue...... so because of this I am assuming there are 649 different species of Pokemon. YEAH I KNOW, kind of nonsense, but I have to fit my taxonomy into the rules that the creators have already set.
Talking about species, there is another problematic topic with Pokemon... EGG GROUPS. If we apply the real life species concept to Pokemon, then a whole egg group would be the same species... like Skitty and Wailord. Evidently this should not be the case. Apparently, reproductive mechanism are totally different in Pokemon compared to real life organisms and, reproduction does not seem to be always correlated with species concept.
This issue is just too controversial and very prone to discussion....... that´s why I like it.
By the way, Eerie Fuwante, no, I will not separate them by Types. Type wont be a taxonomic determinator, because taxonomy should reflect evolution and common ancestry, so grouping Pokemon by morphologic features would seem more logical. Imagine you have a Zebraika, a Rapidash, and a Charizard.... Would you place Rapidash and Charizard in a same family, with Zebraika being a more distant relative?? Or would you group Rapidash and Zebraika in the same group with Charizard as the mor distant relative? I would choose the later, even when Charizard and Rapidash share their fire type. Elemental types are more likely to be a result of convergent evolution, rather than common ancestry.
And about real life phylums... some aspects of the phylogeny will be based on real phylogenetic relationships and taxonom, but not entirely. There wil be some degree of originallity to give the Pokemon evolutionary history some uniqueness. Let´s see how people react to it.
