Armaldo fossils rarely share strata with Anorith, and despite their larger size and convergent evolution with dinosaur pokemon such as Tyranitar, the similarities to their predecessor could not be ignored. Yet for nearly a century after their discovery, Armaldo were believed to be a successor species to Anorith, descendants of some strange line which had survived the extinction of their marine ancestors and come to walk the land.
The Armaldo walked the earth soon after either Groudon or plate tectonics created the first continents, when the new, land-based pokemon had yet to diversify into the seventeen types known today and relied primarily on normal attacks which only scratched Armaldo's rocky surface. Very few Anorith fossils date from this period, because the availability of frequent battles, their tough hide, and their status as apex predator meant that virtually all land Anorith survived to become Armaldo. The wounds from these battles have often been fossilized; many an Armaldo fossil is found with numerous scratches on its exoskeleton, but rarely did they turn into true scars. It is only in the later eras that wounded Armaldo fossils began to appear, and most of those wounds bear the signatures of boulders: the very material their armor was made from became a weapon for their undoing. After all, despite their enormous size, Armaldo were still arthropods with all the vulnerability to rock attacks characteristic of their phylum.
It is only in modern times, when the first revived Anorith evolved, that the connection between the two pokemon was fully understood. It was not only genetic evolution, but the evolution which occurs within a single pokemon's lifetime. As textbooks are updated with this information, schoolchildren will once again be confused by the difference between the evolution of species and the evolution of individual pokemon.