Rampardos are often considered to have possessed the most brute force of any pokemon to have ever walked the earth. This should not be taken to imply that they were every opponent's equal in battle, even in their own time. Their thick hide has been made tougher by fossilization, but Rampardos today still show little ability to withstand attackers, nor are they fast enough to win a battle before their opponent can strike. Although once renowned as the mightiest of their time – the Charizard or Salamence of the late Cretaceous – it has become clear from these revived specimens that Rampardos did not use their heavy and powerful heads to dominate other species of pokemon.
Instead, Rampardos used their heads to battle enemies that could not fight back, but which stymied every competitor of their era: boulders. The fighting type was probably not known in this era, although classifying pokemon types from the fossil record is extraordinarily difficult. It was the Rampardos that filled the niche large fighting pokemon such as Machamp do today, smashing large stones and feeding on the minerals (and quite possibly, rock pokemon remains) contained within.
The supply of Rampardos are tightly controlled today, for they will instinctually smash through buildings and attempt to eat the inhabitants, and require a good deal of retraining to differentiate between manmade structures and natural ones. The rampage of what was almost certainly a feral Rampardos in Saffron City, and the myriad of panicked, inconsistent reports describing this hitherto unknown giant pokemon, captured countless imaginations in its era. Among these were the screenwriters for Pokestar Studios' first hit, the original Big Monster series, and the other progenitors of the kaiju genre.