The main question seems to be "are we biased to use certain animals in mythologies, and on top of that to mix and match specific animals?" and the secondary que

The main question seems to be "are we biased to use certain animals in mythologies, and on top of that to mix and match specific animals?" and the secondary question seems to be "if so, why those animals?" I can imagine the former might be true, but have a hard time seeing how one might prove it. Let alone even try to answer the secondary question. I mean, sure, we have a bunch of different mythical animal amalgams in various cultures. For the sake of the argument we can assume these cultures came up with their hybrids in isolation (because if not that would already answer our secondary question). Even then it is still possible that by chance they may end up with hybrids that have partially overlapping "source animals". So basically a mythological equivalent of a hash collision (except in reverse: the "input" would be the mythical beast and the "hash" would be the source animals). Then these cultures meet, and the natural thing to do is to use the same word for these mythical creatures because of said hash collision. And looking at how we apply the name "dragon " to various mythical beasts we just needed two out of three or more animals overlap, so our odds of a collision is pretty high. Then there's the question of why these hash collisions happen. Note that we're already skipping the option of "because a bad hashing algorithm makes it statistically likely". This book argues it's an "innate evolutionary fear". Innate fears are a very controversial topic within evolutionary psychology. This blog post dissecting another "innate fear of snakes" article[0] does a good job of laying out the issues. Basically, there is a difference between "innate" fear and predisposition to acquire a fear. We only have evidence for the latter: babies, as well as animals raised in a lab, do not have an innate fear of snakes or spiders (or anything really). We look to adults to teach us what is safe and what is dangerous. IIRC we do have some evidence that the predisposition to acquire fear is innate (basically, using doctored footage showing a chimpanzee that appears to freak out at the sight of a flower doesn't succeed in teaching other chimpanzees to be afraid of flowers. It does work for snakes and snake-like shapes). Of course this leads to the question of "why snakes and spiders, but not other predators that our ancestors should have been afraid of?" AFAIK no such predispositions have been shown for the other supposedly common source animals in dragons, and there's lack of spider-like features in these universal "dragons". So this explanation really comes with a ton of issues - it's a typical "reason backwards from the explanation" thing, a just-so story. [0] https://neuroanthropology.net/2008/03/07/innate-fear-of-snakes/ https://neuroanthropology.net/2008/03/07/innate-fear-of-snak... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story