The most unusual thing about the Cradily is that they ever went extinct to begin with. Although the Permian-Triassic mass extinction which wiped these pokemon out was the greatest catastrophe in all of natural history, trainers remain baffled by the fact that the Cradily were among them, for it seems that nothing can take these pokemon down.
Cradily have acquired this reputation not only from the difficulty of attacking their tough, rocky bodies, but also from the remarkable ease at which they repair damage by ingraining their roots and leeching energy from other pokemon through their seeds. Although nurses are required to learn how to treat every pokemon, few of them ever encounter a Cradily, for even after they lose battles they often pop back up before their trainer arrives at a pokemon center. They do not always win, but every match they participate in is a lengthy one, for they must rely on slow, time-consuming measures to whittle down their foes. The Cradily survive extreme heat with ease, and can withstand cold winters, although not as easily as they do other climates. They can live in water and on land, they can survive darkness for months at a time. The only secret to growing them in this era is not to let them starve. And yet somehow, two hundred fifty million years ago, they went extinct.
Yet maybe it is not truly the original Cradily which were brought back from extinction. After all, nearly every Cradily alive today was resurrected from a fossil, which by definition is made of rock that has lasted through the ages; the second generation is only now beginning to bloom. Perhaps it is the hardiness of their fossils, not that of the ancient Cradily, which makes these pokemon so difficult to defeat.