The Science of Starter Pokémon

Understanding the Power that’s Inside!

I was recently watching a video from Minute Earth discussing the closest real-world animals to everyone’s favorite pocket monsters. The video does a great job of taking each of the four starter Pokémon featured above and explaining where adaptations similar to theirs have occurred in nature. This got me thinking about exactly how far of these fictional adaptations could progress if they evolved in real-world animals. Could some version of these Pokémon exist? To answer that, I’ll be building off of the analysis performed by other science enthusiasts and adding my own hypotheses to put together a case for the existence of all four starters and their evolved forms. (Yes. I know Pikachu isn’t one of the original three starters, but what am I supposed to do? Not talk about Pikachu!)

I recommend watching the Minute Earth video to get a quick prerequisite for the biological basis we’ll be working with:

We’ll start with the Pokémon that Minute Earth deemed the most realistic: everyone’s favorite pet firehose…