Here's my question: Does anyone know what the Japanese (or other languages) use as wording for the "Timeline" talk at the Crystal Pool scene? As someone who played a lot of PS1 era RPG's and early 3D Sonic games, rough translations completely losing/changing the meaning of a line isn't unfamiliar territory to me: a Sonic Heroes line for example mixes up referring to a character as "a robot" instead of "artificial" (like organic but created through experiments), which throws off a follow-up line about Cloning and the character's identity.
Like in this case, is "timeline" definitely meant to refer to an alternate version of history/the future as opposed to being a sloppy word for a different period in time?
I still hold to my theory that the Paradox Pokemon are essentially a semi-permanent Terastalization affecting specimens of the Pokemon (EX: Great Tusk is a Tera Fighting Donphan that's stuck halfway there). Terapagos and the Tera Crystals powering the time machine has the effect of essentially fishing out the base Pokemon and the energy causes them to turn into a form based on a Tera Type. The Illustrations of Great Tusk and Iron Treads don't look that far off from more-stylized depictions of Donphan, and to my knowledge they're the only images of Paradoxes we're shown from Heath's Expedition (excluding the explicitly-dreamed Combination Mon). It could just be confirmation bias by the Professor, where the machine brings out a Mon that looks KIND OF like Donphan but not quite, so they take it for an abnormal creature out of the book, where Heath might have recorded them as different species but they would be more akin to Regional Forms of those mons, with no research taking place to answer the question since Heath's team was discredited.
So Great Tusk or Slither Wing isn't what Ancient Donphan or Volcarona look like, so much as they pulled in a Donphan and the Terastal energy caused what we know as GT to come out of the machine.
Like in this case, is "timeline" definitely meant to refer to an alternate version of history/the future as opposed to being a sloppy word for a different period in time?
I still hold to my theory that the Paradox Pokemon are essentially a semi-permanent Terastalization affecting specimens of the Pokemon (EX: Great Tusk is a Tera Fighting Donphan that's stuck halfway there). Terapagos and the Tera Crystals powering the time machine has the effect of essentially fishing out the base Pokemon and the energy causes them to turn into a form based on a Tera Type. The Illustrations of Great Tusk and Iron Treads don't look that far off from more-stylized depictions of Donphan, and to my knowledge they're the only images of Paradoxes we're shown from Heath's Expedition (excluding the explicitly-dreamed Combination Mon). It could just be confirmation bias by the Professor, where the machine brings out a Mon that looks KIND OF like Donphan but not quite, so they take it for an abnormal creature out of the book, where Heath might have recorded them as different species but they would be more akin to Regional Forms of those mons, with no research taking place to answer the question since Heath's team was discredited.
So Great Tusk or Slither Wing isn't what Ancient Donphan or Volcarona look like, so much as they pulled in a Donphan and the Terastal energy caused what we know as GT to come out of the machine.