“Pokémon” has officially gone next-gen: “Legends: Z-A,” the sequel to 2022’s successful open-world spinoff “Pokémon Legends: Arceus,” is a major step-up with enhanced graphics and brand new combat that longtime fans and newcomers will appreciate.

My time with the upcoming game -- split into two 10-minute sessions -- was hardly enough to reveal every way Z-A will build on its predecessor. The groundbreaking 2022 title Pokemon Legends: Arceus brought the storied monster-training franchise into an open world set in its distant past -- a wilder,

That still didn’t stop me from making a rookie error in Pokémon Legends: Z-A. I panicked and sent out my Weedle against an NPC’s Pidgeotto, which it is very much weak to. It got one-shotted, obviously.

Z-A didn’t feel like a full action game to me, but kind of more like an MMO, with its casting times, cooldowns, and behind-the-scenes math happening. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do hope Legends: Z-A gets challenging enough to make me more intentionally dish out commands and think about switching Pokémon at just the right moment.

Researchers this week officially named Janjucetus dullardi, a cartoonish creature with bulging eyes the size of tennis balls, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Scientist Erich Fitzgerald described the 25-million-year-old fossil as “some weird kind of mash-up between a whale, a seal and a Pokémon.”

Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird and feral.