Reddit reviews The Dissection of Vertebrates

Honestly, modern diversity is pretty good and you ought to get your head around how modern animals work before going into the fossil organisms where a lot of the anatomy is pretty speculative. I can speak to vertebrate morphology much better than invertebrate morphology, so my recommendations will focus on that.

1. A good dissection guide would help a lot. Personally, I like the De Iuliis & Pulera guide. It's well-illustrated and pretty generally clear.
   
   
2. Second thing you need is some reference material on biomechanics and general vertebrate morphology. There are a lot of vertebrate morphology textbooks out there, the Bemis text is probably fine for your purposes. A more specialized text on functional morphology (e.g. this one) would probably help a lot as well.
   
   
3. For fossil stuff, the best textbook surveying fossil morphology of vertebrates is probably the Carroll text, but it is incomplete for a lot of taxa. I really like the Gregory text on fish skulls, for example, which may fill in some of the gaps that Carroll leaves out.
   
   Finally, Stuart Sumida is a vertebrate paleontologist and functional morphologist who periodically consults with Disney and other major animation studios on animal & human locomotion. He's part of the reason there's a sea-change in animal (and human) animation quality in Disney films from Lion King onwards. He's got a bunch of animation resources here and periodically offers workshops for animators. His slides are mostly pretty text-sparse but there may be something of use in there.