You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.

And welcome to Pokey.

Hello, Will.

After 10,000 years, I'm free, David.

And hello, everybody.

And welcome back to Pokey in honor of the 30 year anniversary of the Pokemon franchise.

This is a special series where we are speculatively evolving Pokemon.

This episode, our Pokemon to evolve, is Gatina, which promises to be very weird.

It's extremely.

I'm so excited.

I think this was the first Pokemon that I had the thought of like, I want to do Giratina.

I don't know what it's going to end up being, but I want to do it.

Just like the parent series to this series, Spook E, the goal here is to choose creatures from fiction

and speculate upon how that creature or something like it could evolve in the real world

following the rules and patterns of real life evolutionary processes.

We will be discussing where on the known tree of life these creatures might evolve and what

habitats, behavior, selective pressures might lead them to evolving their distinctive features.

Pokey is a five-episode series starting the first Saturday in February,

continuing Saturdays after that. Each episode, we are focusing our speculative evolving lens on

legendary Pokemon. Legendaries because they are among the coolest, the most well-known, the most fleshed out,

and there's a thousand and we had to narrow the list down somehow.

Last episode, we did Lugia, the legendary bird.

...