Honooguma, Borubeaa, and Dainabea are the three stages of an entirely scrapped design for the fire starters, predating Cyndaquil and its evolutions. This was dug up from the Spacworld '97 Demo for Pokemon Gold and Silver and is one of the starters you automatically receive randomly when you play the demo. Game Freak never said why these were scrapped, but it was thought to be too similar to Growlithe and Arcanine. However, Honooguma's legacy remains as there is an early design for Teddiursa, another bear Pokemon, in the 1999 demo! Its pose highly resembles Honooguma and is thought to be taken from Honooguma's design. I'll talk about beta Teddiursa another day but it's important to note I feel. Another thing to note is that for the playable 1997 demo, they removed the evolution of Honooguma to Borubeaa, presumably as a way to prevent players from overleveling the starter and seeing its evolution.

I'm looking into this more and beta Teddiursa directly replaced Honooguma's slot!? so that directly confirms that Teddiursa was the Honooguma replacement! It seems Borubeaa was going to get a redesign between Spaceworld '97 and June 1999, but it was unfinished and had no color before being replaced by Quilava in its place. Dainabeaa got directly replaced by Typhlosion too!