Hmm. What have I said about Cubone before? Let’s see… well, someone brought up the whole “Cubone are orphaned Kangaskhan” thing, and my feeling there is that I think there would be clearer evidence for it if Game Freak actually intended us to see them that way, but it’s a cool idea and makes sense. That doesn’t help us much when we actually hatch Cubone though, because we have no dead parent if that happens. I think Cubone born to living Marowak parents must have to go and find skulls and clubs from ancestral ‘graveyard’ sites, which they maintain because reverence for the dead is so important to their species. It’s a kind of rite of passage for them.
If you want to explain how a baby Cubone just immediately pops out of the egg with a skull already on his adorable little head, with no spiritual quest or anything like that necessary, well, obviously the real reason is that creating special breeding mechanics just for Cubone was clearly a waste of time, and we sort of have to accept it as a necessary gameplay abstraction. Alternatively, though… I don’t know if anyone’s even considered this, but just to go all Occam’s Razor on you, maybe the whole thing is just a story? Like, is it possible that the skull thing is honestly just what Cubone look like, and people came up with this strange mythology around them to explain their menacing appearance and haunting wails, which then gets reported as fact in the Pokédex because the Pokédex is approximately 48% complete bull$#!t? We never see them remove the skull helmets, so who’s to say those aren’t really part of their heads? That makes the whole thing remarkably easy, albeit a little less exciting.
Pokémaniacal 