Crammed into a corner of Caron’s office is a small sofa piled with plush stuffed toys, cuddly versions of fossils from the Burgess Shale. A big-eyed, velvety brown Anomalocaris dominates the top of the pile. But before the Cambrian animals were imagined as toys, they were two-dimensional smears on rock.

“The toys are an example of how artistic representation bridges between scientific discovery and the broad dissemination of knowledge,” says Caron.

Another, perhaps more practical, way that art disseminates science is through illustration. Caron and his former Ph.D. student Cédric Aria recently published a revised description of the Burgess Shale fossil Habelia optata. Scientific illustrator Joanna Liang joined their team and together they tackled the challenge of bringing Habelia back to digital life.

Now, while Habelia hasn’t yet achieved a level of celebrity worthy of its own plushie, Caron credits Liang’s illustrations for making the animal a media darling. Do a web search and it isn’t the fossils that come up, but instead Liang’s illustrations representing what the animal might have looked like.

“Of course, I would like to have the fossil close to the illustration for balance.” Caron laughs. “You don’t want to give the idea that Habelia is something that exists today.”

The long-extinct Habelia is a close relative to the common ancestor of all chelicerates. Chelicerates include mites, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and spiders.

Caron and his research team have published dozens of papers and almost all their studies have included detailed interpretive images, or paleo art, prepared by highly trained illustrators.

“We work with artists to include illustrations as part of our published outcomes, scientific papers. Scientific illustrations summarize a lot of information into one drawing,” says Caron. A visual reconstruction of the animal is more powerful than text and no specialized knowledge or training is required to read it, he says.

“It doesn’t have to be an animal. It could be, let’s say, a genetic pathway; something very difficult for people to grasp but if they see an image of it, they understand how it may work or function.”

Caron also considers the interaction with the artist part of the scientific process of discovery– discovery that can be made difficult by the nature of the fossils.

Buried in mudflow, many of the fossils are flattened in the rock. The animals are no longer three-dimensional. Each specimen has been preserved at only one angle, but working with a collection of different specimens buried at different angles provides a variety of views. The views from different angles enable the scientific illustrator to reconstruct the hypothetical three-dimensional structure of the animal.

“The scientific illustrator asks questions that push us to find answers. Working with the illustrator helps to reinforce most of our interpretations and refine others,” says Caron.

Joanna Liang has been fascinated with the Burgess Shale ever since she learned of it in first-year biology. Liang grew up in Vancouver, 760 km from the rich fossil bed in Yoho National Park. She majored in biology and was particularly interested in the anatomy and physiology of invertebrates.

“Animals in the Cambrian like Hallucigenia, Pikaia, and Anomalocaris were just so different. We can learn so much about the origin of modern animals from these fossils.” The Skype connection almost crackles from the enthusiasm in Liang’s voice as she speaks from her home in Vancouver. “The especially rare preservation of even soft-bodied creatures in the Burgess Shale makes it monumental in the study of the evolution of early life.”

A self-taught artist, Liang incorporated art into her science studies. She used art to memorize chemical pathways and anatomical structures. She would draw a jelly fish, label it and study from it for an exam. To simplify pathways in physiology, she drew diagrams and shared them with her classmates. She also tutored university students in art.

Liang had to understand and study the fossil the way paleontologists do. She worked in the lab with Aria to view Habelia through microscopes and compare various specimens

From the data they collected, she drew a series of sketches that became the technical drawings—the job of a 2D paleoartist. Her highly accurate technical drawings showed lateral, dorsal, and ventral views of Habelia in straightforward detail.

“Someone like Joanna is a rare thing,” says Caron. “I don’t work with any one artist who creates both the technical drawings and life reconstruction, and 2D artists don’t usually work on 3D animation. I have an animator in Australia who works exclusively in 3D. To have that full range of skills makes Joanna very special.”

Liang’s work proves the notion that the artist plays a central role in science discovery and science communication.

“One of the simpler ways that art is used is to take complex information and make it digestible and understandable,” says Chris Ferguson, CEO of Bridgeable.

Bridgeable, a research, design, and consultancy firm in Toronto, works with organizations to redefine how they interact with their patients, clients or customers. He and his team have helped researchers to improve the translation of their data into patient care or healthcare services.

Ferguson says that communicating information is more than just adorning data with an image. Visualizing large quantities of data allows researchers to think about the information differently. Making the data interactive lets researchers work with the information in different ways. Creating an animation like Liang’s can make raw scientific discovery meaningful to an audience completely different from its initial scientific audience.

“In order to mobilize knowledge, you need to make information relevant and usable to other audiences—people involved in creating solutions who will use the knowledge in different ways,” says Ferguson. “The issue isn’t our ability to accumulate data. The issue is our ability to translate knowledge and apply it in order to make an impact in the world.”

Since Aria and Caron published their findings in BMC Evolutionary Biology in 2017, Habelia has received nonstop attention from media organizations such as CBC News, Newsweek, LiveScience, and the Daily Mail. And its celebrity continues.

“Habelia would never have received this kind of coverage without Joanna’s illustrations,” says Caron.

Liang says her work will be included in the ROM’s Spiders: Fear & Fascination exhibit that opens June 16. Visitors will see the ROM’s authentic Habelia fossil, Liang’s technical drawings, 2D life reconstruction, and 3D animation. They will even see a hand-painted, large scale, 3D-model of Habelia that Liang’s research supervisor David Mazierski printed from her 3D animation files.

Liang also says that she and Caron have been contacted by a producer from CBC television’s The Nature of Things regarding a future documentary. Liang, who graduated from the Biomedical Communications program in 2017, never imagined that her master’s research would receive so much attention, nor that the attention would continue long after she had finished the project.

“My parents are ecstatic that my artwork is going to be in the Royal Ontario Museum,” she says. “But have you seen the plushies Dr. Caron has in his office?” She means the stuffed Cambrian animal toys piled on Caron’s sofa. “If he ever has a Habelia plushie made, please! I want one!”