We need a bunch of horned toad lizard man shooting blood from their eyes or gila monster lizard men with venomous bites.
Now you have me wondering where dragons fit on the evolutionary tree.
Assuming a wyvern-looking Game of Thrones style dragon, since six limbs doesn’t seem remotely possible for a tetrapod, my guess would be that they’d have split off from the main archosaur lineage sometime after turtles and Sauropterygids like plesiosaurs, but before true dinosaurs; maybe they’re early-diverging stem pterosaurs, or maybe they split off on their own around the same time.
A six limbed dragon on the other hand would have to have split off ridiculously early. I’m maybe totally misreading the sources but it sounds like we were on the path to having two pairs of limbs when we were still jawless fish. So they’d be the sole survivors of a lineage that’s hundreds of millions of years old and which evolved Jaws and paired limbs (and every other seemingly reptilian trait) independently.
Or as Physics doesn’t allow them to fly, assume they are relics of a magical time and basically aliens to our real world biology. It is easier and simpler. Most fantasy worlds outside of Pern, tend to make dragons very ancient beasts and Pern dragons are literally a genetically manipulated alien to earth species.
Dwarf Fortress has you covered:
There are toad men and various kinds of lizard men as well but no horned toad lizard men.
Homebrew it, fun and easy.
Here is a great tool for such set to lizardfolk as the base: https://2014.5e.tools/makebrew.html#creaturebuilder; this is for 5e.2014 though. There is a 2024 version also, https://5e.tools/makebrew.html#creaturebuilder.
The thing about the D&D multiverse is that after so many millennia of gods, demons and wizards fucking around with genetics, I doubt natural evolution can get a word in edgewise.
In Middle-Earth, Morgoth (pretty much a Lucifer stand-in and at very least the big Dark God) bred the dragons, first flightless and then winged and flying.
With Moorcock’s multiverse, the “Dragons” predate the Melnibonés and I think are technically ancestors also. They’re not classic dragons, but dragon-like.
Fafnir was probably the other major western inspiration for D&D dragons with Smaug. He was originally a Dwarf, and usually drawn with 4 legs and wings. Though the oldest descriptions seems to be more of a crawling on the ground, poison breather.
Of course Gold Dragons were inspired by Chinese Dragons. These were most often 4 legged, wingless and serpentine.
Greek Dragons were all over the place, mostly serpentine, some with wings. Some with many heads, various number of legs.
The winged dragon probably originated with Iranian people of western Asia and Persia. From there it peculated to the Greeks and Romans, who spread it throughout their empire, as far west as Wales.
Ugh. I suppose that it’s not-to-be noticed that Aragorn led a multiculture, multispecies coalition against the Sauron and that the one guy who disparaged people like this : “Dotard! What is the House of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs?”" is Saruman
TL;DR I presume someone’s brought up the question of whether some “races” literally are ugly evil monsters because they aren’t natural, they were made to be so. Orcs literally bred to be depraved and twisted by the in-universe equivalent of an incarnate Satan for example. Beyond that I can see plenty of room for creatures that may not be “evil” at least on their own terms but who nonetheless leave little room to be anything but adversaries who can be shown no quarter. How does one engage in diplomacy and cultural appreciation with Mind Flayers?
As long as we’re quoting 1E orcs, let’s remember this note from that monster manual:
I’m kinda surprised this discussion is still going on, four years later. To my mind, Tolkien orcs don’t map exactly to American racism, but they smack strongly of British imperial racism; and so, so much of the American fantasy derived from Tolkien et all is absolutely steeped in American racism. That quote about “unsavory mongrels” and “10% can pass” could come right out of Bull Connor’s playbook.
Saying that Tolkien, or Gygax, are fish swimming in a racist sea isn’t condemning them out of hand. They were, like everyone, complex and multifaceted people, and their creative endeavors reflect that complexity. I can adore the Shire while disliking his orcss, and I can play D&D for four decades and counting while not being down with pearl-clutching talk about “unsavory mongrels” as applied to those who race-mix.
I’d have said British classism, the presumption that the lowers are degenerates.
In the campaign setting I was running there were two moons one of which had a cycle lasting exactly one month and the other one quarter. You see, there was this very powerful wizard who liked things neat and orderly.
In reality in those pre-PC days it was so I had to calculate the rise and set times only once.
The spec evo stuff is definitely more suited for a more scifi leaning setting than D&D proper (although I do vaguely recall some mentions of things evolving to eat magical radiation in an Underdark source book).
But I could see it making for a fun setting. Maybe a massive underground cavern opens up revealing an ecosystem that was sealed away for 500 million years that’s full of an entire ecosystem of hexapods, the apex predators of which are dragon-like. Or maybe some kind of time wonkiness causes portals to open around the world, letting in long extinct species like dinosaurs, and then a portal opens to a distant future after a mass extinction wiped out most life and a new set of vertebrate-like creatures with six limbs took over. (Oooh, and a distant future six limbed intelligent creature could be responsible for the time wonkiness in the first place - maybe they’re trying to cause the mass extinction that allows their form of life to evolve.)
There’s a part of me that wants to message my gaming group and tell them I have a new concept for a campaign… 
Wasn’t that the premise behind the SF series Primeval?
Quote possibly - I’ve never seen the show, but I’m sure I read the Wikipedia summary for it, and maybe that’s how the idea entered my subconscious.
“degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” is in no way classism.
“I did not know that”- thanks.
But apparently, now Kobolds are related to dragons.
That makes sense to me, I mean the only “Black” race were the Drow, and by no means were they inferior to humans. Yes, their religion and culture made many of them Evil, but Dritzz is one of the biggest Good D&D heroes of all time.
Where did Tolkien say that?
Letter #210.
This is seriously the first time you’re seeing that quote?
So, Tolkien wrote about a dozen books, one of which has nearly 500000 words, and you have to turn to a letter where he is talking about the animated film to show orcs are a racist stereotype?