Lights All Askew in the Heavens

This weekend (around watching the Perseids) I've continued to work on the set of illustrations for the Evolution of the Horse textbook I've been working on over the last month. The textbook series' demographic is 12-14 year-olds, so the author often has images that are standard in most academic writing about the topic, but wants them a little brighter and (ideally) more dynamic. Here's an example of the type of image she wanted recreated:

And here's the version I ended up with:

Some of the pieces are information-heavy (maps of fossil discoveries, charts of body mass increase across millenia), but my favorites, unsurprisingly, are the ones that deal directly with depicting the bodies of the animals.