They're the same characters. At one stage Hasbro wanted Optimus Primal and Megatron to appear in their bat and 'gator forms at the beginning of Season 1, to have them change to their gorilla and T-rex forms later. As a result the early episodes involved Optimus Primal _flying_ - it was originally intended to be him flying in his beast mode. But Hasbro later decided against this to save money (because it would have required creating separate CG models for the bat & gator on top of creating the gorilla and T-Rex), so the idea was scrapped and rather than drastically re-writing the early eps, they were editted to accomodate their gorilla and T-Rex forms... Primal's flying bat mode was replaced with Prime Jets in Primal's robot mode.
Also, the early toy continuity wasn't isolated to those two toys alone, all the early Beast Wars toys were intended to be part of that continuity. It wasn't until Mainframe Entertainment created a new continuity for Beast Wars that subsequent bio & tech specs were written to conform to that continuity.
Now having said all that, there are Japanese exclusive repaints of these toys which _are_ intended to be G1 Optimus Prime and Megatron as Beast Wars Transformers, but their colours are drastically different. Optimus Prime (Convobat) is red, blue and white with a silver Maximal insignia on his wing and G1 Megatron (Megalligator) is black and purple with a silver Predacon insignia on his chest/gator head. They came in a two pack that also came with an exclusive CD ROM (compatible with Windows 95 and Mac OS!). But the blue bat and green gator are indeed meant to be Optimus Primal and BW Megatron; we never saw them in these forms in the show, but it doesn't mean that they're not necessarily the same character.
Besides, that quote was from the Covenant of Primus... Primus being a multiversal singularity and possibly his Covenant too - perhaps the prophecy of the Beast Wars in the Covenant could be applied across different continuities.
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Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime
