“Now that MLP #24 is officially out I can show you guys some concept stuff! The jackals, the cats, the Butterdragon & the Roc (which the Roc isnt really seen in its entirety in the comic..!)  
As you can see, the first designs were more just heres a basic jackal and heres a basic cat in nature. This got called by Hasbro and they asked to have the creatures be more mystical. Back to the ol drawing board!  
Anubis became a bipedal creature, more along the lines of how hes depicted in actual Egyptian heiroglyphics, and Baast & the cats got spruced up. The three tails idea came from Jeremy, and he also suggested the wings were a bit much, so I ditched em. (I kinda added the wings as a nod to my OC Ary, but was cool with leaving them out too). The colours for Baast werent from Ary though (Ary is also purple), but more so based on Twilight Sparkles palette. The cutie marks on their foreheads were asked to be removed by the peeps at Hasbro as well.  
The reference to the blue cat being Rainbow Dash was more defined with the forehead cutie marks (I even have Scootaloo pointing to her own forehead while she talks about the cat being familiar), so hopefully the parallel is still easy to recognize without them.  
And now you know the secret history of Ancient Anugypt!”