Celebrim
Legend
I have never found the need for more than chromatic dragons. I've never even really decided for myself whether the metallic dragons even exist in my campaign world, because I've never found the need for one. They don't seem to serve a useful purpose in a story line, or at least, the stories I enjoy. They are too alien, solitary, and powerful to serve as allies, and only fit neatly into bad guys in an evil themed game (which I don't generally run). I suppose I could reinvent them as cosmopolitian creatures, and pull the trick where the mentor figure/quest provider you meet at level 1 turns out to be an enormously powerful dragon - but somehow that feels to me like its been done. Besides, there would be too much danger of a DM PC in that which would deprotagonize our intended heroes.
However, there are a lot of 'drake' like creatures that are assumed to exist - spire drakes, forest drakes, mini-dragons, night drakes, fire drakes, river drakes, bog drakes, sand drakes, etc. - and seeing one is scarsely stranger than seeing a hawk or a wolf in our world. Generally speaking, these are all unique and don't necessarily have stats like any published monster with a similar name. On the other hand, because they are relatively mundane they don't seem to show up very often in roles critical to a plot. After level 1 or so, they tend to show up as the same sort of background color as seals, deer, buffalo, etc.
Hydras are ought there and won't go away just because they are so and have always been so nicely dangerous that D&D needs them if only for gamist reasons. Linnorms and the rest don't seem to me to fill a particularly useful niche; I can see them being used in world building instead of dragons but not in addition to them. That's probably a bias in my part. I like every monster in its place and a place for every monster, so I tend to be picky about what I allow to exist except as a unique creature.
As for dinosaurs, the world of my homebrew is only 1000's of years old and has almost continious written history (some creatures alive in the current era can remember when the world was new), so the notion of 'lost worlds' doesn't really make a lot of sense. Mastadons are not only normal fauna, but regularly domesticated as draft animals. Because however I like dinosaurs, I've decided that they are actually the product not of a lost ecology, but of a lost civilization, which was skilled in the magical manipulation of life and bred them to be war beasts and beasts of burden (the D&D monsters which are supposedly creations of insane wizards date to this era as well). The few remaining dinosaurs have gone wild, and the techniques for rearing them and breeding them have been lost (though could be recovered by an interested PC).
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