Here's another "author's insight" into my reasoning when I wrote that fantasy trilogy all those years ago.
I decided to have humans be evolved from dragons, even though they look like real humans in our real evolutionary tree. Why? Because already in the 1990's I was so freaking sick of monkey business. While I am all for preserving all endangered species and so forth, and I love all life, I must admit that monkey business and chimp behavior had outworn their welcome with me quite a long time ago. It is from the mutual chimp ancestor that humans have developed much of their less desirable anti-social traits that led to the fall of Adam and Eve. I don't feel this way about all monkeys and primates. I love spider monkeys, for example. But chimps and humans have a shared genetic predisposition to a set of flaws that I'm more disgusted with than you can imagine, and already in the 1990's it had worked my last nerve. Now I'm not saying to run out and be cruel to a chimp, far from it. I'm just saying that for my PRIVATE literary outlet, the last thing that I wanted was to have to accurately portray chimp/human derived behavior. So that is why I decided to "skip the mammal evolution path" and have humans "descend directly from dragons," even though a pretty smart 8th grader could have seen that this was a scientific non sequitur.
Pictures of MJ with "Bubbles" irritated me to no end. Going to the zoo? I skip the chimp exhibit (though I like the gorillas). Figure it out, Einsteins. It had nothing to do with the "dragon" of the Bible, morons. (No offense to real people with genuine mental handicaps).