Feature May/June edition 2026: When science meets art

Emphasising the intersection of science and visual art, Kliti Grice is transforming microscopic fossil research by revealing the beauty of ancient life in a newly released series of ultra close up images. Grice is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the WA Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre, an internationally recognised research base studying Earth’s past and present using chemistry and fossils to help us understand the ancient environments of life on Earth.

Grice says the newly released limited edition prints are drawn directly from the centre’s research, translating complex scientific work into a striking visual form that brings Earth’s deep history into focus. “The collection has been developed as a way for members of the public to engage with science through these stunning visuals,” she says.   

Grice’s work reaches back millions of years, before modern humans roamed the earth, and she travels around the world to explore extinction events in deep history. An example is WA OIGC’s involvement in drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to research the end-Cretaceous extinction, approximately 66 million years ago, when dinosaurs were wiped out as a result of a massive asteroid measuring 10 to 15 kilometres in diameter, forming a crater 180 kilometres wide. “We’ve looked at what happened in the crater that was formed before and after, and showed what microbes actually survived after the meteorite hit. I guess it was originally a small shallow Great Barrier Reef or Shark Bay type environment,” she says. 

Fossilisation is an intricate part of her research, but what exactly happens to fossils? Grice says fossils are usually completely replaced by minerals. “There’s usually no organics preserved, but in certain cases you can get what’s called exceptional preservation, and that’s where leaves, for instance, with a waxy coat, have a big, massive molecule that gets selectively preserved. Full decomposition doesn’t occur in exceptional preservation, so you end up with soft tissues being preserved, such as blood cells and skin, and you also get the intact molecules from the lipids (a diverse group of organic compounds, including fats, oils, waxes and steroids that are essential for life) and the pigments from the particular organism.”

A couple of the images in the series are from Brazil, particularly the pterosaur (a flying reptile), with a three-dimensional bone. Grice says it’s like a finger from the wing of a pterosaur. “What we’ve done is to find out how that has been mineralised. It occurs in a big boulder called a concretion. So it’s like inside a big round boulder of limestone and you open it up and you can see the fossilised bones inside. The bone is hollow like a bird bone, as the pterosaur flew and has hollow bones like birds to enable it to fly. But the microbes help make the minerals inside the bone during fossilisation and this is what we can see. So what’s happened with that one is that all the minerals are inside the hollow part of the bone and you can see the different stages of preservation and processes that have gone on by the microbiomes – tiny microbes helping degrade the fats and preserve tissues and bone for example.”

While many would find complex geochemical data associated with Grice’s research difficult to grasp, Grice says the newly released images make research more intuitive, memorable and accessible without losing its scientific meaning. “Linking science and creative expression makes research more understandable, engaging and impactful,” she says. “Scientific findings – especially in areas like geochemistry – can be abstract and data-heavy, but creative approaches translate them into visuals, narratives or experiences that people can relate to. This helps wider audiences grasp complex ideas such as deep time, microscopic processes or environmental change.”

Explore the series at https://payments.curtin.edu.au/WA-OIGCResearchArtShop/