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Rapid environmental changes tend to trigger resettlements, large-scale migrations, and notable shifts in migration patterns. As they travel between cultural spheres, human actors are not only exposed to new artistic modes, but are also introduced to the topographical features of unfamiliar landscapes and the make-up of new ecosystems. Adaptations to both novel cultural environs and biological environments lead to new ways of envisioning and representing fauna in art. This panel explores the role of non-human actors, that is, fantastic images of composite animals in the making of visual cultures across Afro-Eurasia. The papers thus address the implications of various entanglements. Of utmost significance is the entanglement of the human maker and the non-human hybrid beast as a co-agent in the construction of a visual language. No less important is the relationship between humans and their sociopolitical settings: what makes communities manufacture fantastic visions of wildlife in funerary, court, ceremonial, literary, religious contexts? Do sedentary empires envision fantastic beasts differently from their nomadic neighbors? Whether implemented in portable art, illustrated manuscripts, or monumental architecture, zoomorphic images inform our understanding of the economy, collective memory, and cognitive responses of humans from various social structures and niches in society; as such, zoomorphic configurations can also serve as status or identity-signifiers. This panel looks at the construction, meaning and social lives of animal imagery which, via the Steppe and Silk Routes, spread across Afro-Eurasia, a supercontinent of diverse biota and climate conditions.