Quote Originally Posted by The Enterer View Post
I'm not sure I buy that completely. I don't really 'see' a snake when I look at most depictions of dragons. And Why would the giant lizard be such a constant? Why not giant rats or giant frogs?
Humans all over the world have had a fear/worship relationship with snakes throughout history, and many people have a fear of snakes written deeply in their genes, to the extent that any snake they encounter literally appears monstrous and huge. It's only natural that, in depicting this fear, we conflate serpent features with other natural enemies--lions, bats, wolves--and connect them to any related creature we encounter, like monitor lizards or dinosaur bones, but snakes remain the creatures with perhaps the single strongest hold on our imagination. For the agricultural societies in which dragon myths arose, where most people worked in the fields, this had to be doubly true.

Our modern depictions tend to be lion bodies with crocodile legs and serpent necks, and more creatures of the air than the earth and water, which divorces them in our minds from their origins, but they still bear little resemblance to a T-rex or Pterodactyl.