When I sat in on Cameron’s meetings with Weta Digital to review their visual effects shots for Avatar, he regularly told artists things like, “Just reference a rattlesnake’s quadrate bone.” A science groupie, Cameron grounds even his most fantastical creatures and plants in some kind of reality.

In this photo essay for Time, I show the deliberate visual parallels between life on Avatar and life on Earth, with a welcome assist from Avatar creature designer Neville Page. Page and I talked about the Thanator’s armored black skin, which is modeled on the chitinous texture of a caterpillar’s cocoon, the tree-swinging Prolemuris, Pandora’s version of the “Missing Link,” and several other Earthly muses for Cameron’s fictional world.