MissingNo. (Fossil Kabutops form)
Walk into the Pewter City museum and look at the skeleton behind the glass. That is not decoration. The Kabutops fossil is a real sprite with a real address in the ROM, drawn for exactly one scene, and index 182 is where it leads a second life.
This is MissingNo. wearing a borrowed body. The stats, the Bird and Normal types, the doubled Water Gun and the Sky Attack, every byte of its data is the same MissingNo. you meet off the Cinnabar coast, because its Pokedex byte is the same zero. What changes is one special case in the sprite loader: the game checks for this exact index and, instead of decoding garbage, politely fetches the museum's Kabutops skeleton. The developers wrote that check for the museum scene. They never imagined a wild encounter would take the same road.
The result is one of the eeriest encounters in the game: a museum exhibit with an attack stat above Mewtwo's, floating where a Pokemon should be, immune to nothing and defended by exactly zero. Catch it and it still multiplies the sixth item in your bag, still scrambles the Hall of Fame, still answers to the name MISSINGNO.
Of the three special forms, this one feels the most like archaeology. The other two, the Aerodactyl fossil and the Lavender Tower ghost, have their own files in this catalogue.
BIRD NORMAL
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 182 of the species table | 0xB6 (182) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410D9 | 0 (no real Pokemon is 0, so the game improvises) |
| Stats entry | 0x39FC2 (entry 255: unsigned byte math on dex 0) | 00 21 88 00 1D 06 06 00 1D 8F... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x88 = 8 wide, 8 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C930 | 8C 88 92 92 88 8D 86 8D 8E E8 |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 29 |
Front sprite pointer 0x1900 resolves into ROM bank 0 (deterministic) at file offset 0x1900. The decode is deterministic: it looks the same on every cartridge, every time.
Byte for byte identical in Blue.
Base stats
Its stat spread, straight from the entry bytes. Glitch specimens love extremes, a wall with zero attack, or a paper-thin speedster.
Moves
Knows from the start: WATER GUN, WATER GUN, SKY ATTACK.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| Nothing. Its learnset pointer leads nowhere useful. | |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM01 | MEGA PUNCH |
| TM02 | RAZOR WIND |
| TM03 | SWORDS DANCE |
| TM05 | MEGA KICK |
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM10 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| TM11 | BUBBLEBEAM |
| TM13 | ICE BEAM |
| TM14 | BLIZZARD |
| TM17 | SUBMISSION |
| TM19 | SEISMIC TOSS |
| TM20 | RAGE |
| TM25 | THUNDER |
| TM26 | EARTHQUAKE |
| TM27 | FISSURE |
| TM29 | PSYCHIC |
| TM30 | TELEPORT |
| TM43 | SKY ATTACK |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM45 | THUNDER WAVE |
| TM49 | TRI ATTACK |
| HM01 | CUT |
| HM02 | FLY |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| None. This creature is final. | |
The glitches with a face
Almost every creature in here wears whatever your Game Boy last drew, a smear of borrowed video memory. These three do not. Their index numbers happen to point at real, finished sprites the game keeps around for other reasons, so alone among the glitches, they have a face somebody actually drew.
That is the whole difference. Not new art, just a glitch whose broken pointer landed on a picture instead of on noise.
Hear its cry
A cry is three bytes the game looks up by index number: a base sound, a pitch, and a length. This specimen reads its three bytes straight from the table. I rebuild the sound live from the Game Boy's two pulse channels and its noise channel. This is not a recording.
Does it still work?
This is the question people actually ask about a glitch, so here is the honest answer for this one.
| Where | Still works? |
|---|---|
| Original Game Boy cartridge | Yes. The source of every byte on this page. |
| Game Boy Color / Super Game Boy | Yes, with the auto-assigned palette shown above. |
| 3DS Virtual Console (2016 re-release) | Yes. Nintendo shipped the re-release unpatched, so this is the most accessible way to reach it in 2026. |
| Later remakes (FireRed, Let's Go, and newer) | No. Rebuilt engines, the empty-slot overflow that produces this creature is gone. |
Fight it yourself
This is our from-scratch recreation of the Red battle engine. The enemy team is preset to this specimen; pick your own fighter, glitch or otherwise.
Every number on this page was read from a Pokemon Red ROM by reproducing the game's own out-of-bounds memory reads. Nothing is invented. Part of The Glitchhouse.