i don't really like it when western mythological terms are applied haphazardly to essentially unrelated ideas. this is a completely lost battle but a lóng is really not a dragon, it is its own thing with only surface level similarities
i especially dislike many works that try to fold all sorts of different mythologies into a single consistent schema because they tend to heavily privilege western conceptions in doing so- see 'dragonology' books twisting basically every mythical reptilian under the sun into the mould of 'a species of dragon', implicitly centring the beowulf-style firebreather as the default from which all other mythologies derive, or basically anything that does worldwide vampire bloodlines
relatedly a qílín is not a unicorn, a fènghuáng is not a phoenix, and a jiāngshī is not a vampire, and it can impede understanding when they're approached from the standpoint of being the 'chinese version' of these concepts from western myth
no, this is pretty much baseless supposition. the idea that you can trace any mythological idea back to a common root is a largely discredited one that doesn't hold up to a lot of scrutiny. at minimum one would want to uncover some pretty hefty archaeological evidence to make claims about such direct transmission over many, many thousands of years!
Mythical animals don't have a phylogenetic tree.




















