Weird Pokémon theory. I just noticed that maybe, just maybe, the Dreepy line might be a subtle reference to MissingNo.
I mean sure, it's obviously a Diplocaulus, and I really don't know why ghosts of extinct animals are such a rare trope. The only other examples I can think of off the top of my head are that one episode of Love, Death and Robots and Darcy Little Badgers beautiful novel Elatsoe.
But when you look at Dreepys design, it seems to be something else. Back in the day, MissingNo. had two glitched-out sprites and three sprites that were taken from elsewhere in the game. It's those three:
Two are fossils of extinct Pokémon, just like Dreepy's Diplocaulus, and one is a ghost. So in a way, MissingNo. was the original extinct ghost Pokémon. Also the Diplocaulus head shape is pretty similar to Kabutops, while the Dreepy families other type is dragon, which isn't Aerodactyl's type, but come on, it's clearly a dragon.
Also shout-out to another ghost dinosaur that's not part of the above-mentioned trope because it's the ghost of an extant species of dinosaur. Come to think of it, for a series so heavily focused on dinosaurs, the Super Mario World/Yoshi's Island series features a remarkable lack of stereotypical prehistoric tropes...
This time, it's about glitches from yoshi's island.
Did you know? There's a glitch were yoshi gets teleported to 1-1 in any level?
There's multiple ways this can happen, but I'm showing you the easiest way to do it.
On 4-7, there's a big bounce pad you can access, once you bounce, hold to the left and Yoshi gets teleported to the upper left corner of 1-1 background, afterwards, you need to flutter 9 times in order for the game to realize you are in 1-1.
There's other ways to do this trick:
1# Entering a pressing up and down at the same time in a green pipe.
2# Enemy placement on a castle, specially a blind boo setup.
my extremely bad last week is following me into this week and honest to god i am going insane. it's like. literally every single stupid thing happens, especially things that are disrupting the things i'm doing to destress from the extremely bad things. i'm not even sad anymore i'm just every kind of pissed off and angry and it feels Bad, Dude.