Carolyn Bartlett Gast

[1] She studied book illustrating at Boston University and spent a year training and drafting for the Army Map Service.

[2] Gast worked at the Departments of Vertebrate and Invertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.,[3] from 1954 to 1985.

[5] Her most well known and reproduced illustration is of the loriciferan phylum pliciloricus enigmatus,[6] which was discovered in 1983 by the Danish biologist Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen in the microscopic ecosystem between grains of sand.

[9] She invented an ultra mini-vacuum cleaner that could be held in one hand for taking excess carbon dust from the illustration board.

[2] In 1984, the National Museum of Natural History held an exhibition of 80 of Gast's works, including illustrations of fossils, fish, insects and invertebrates.

Illustration of the loriciferan phylum pliciloricus enigmatus by Gast for a 1986 Smithsonian report titled New Loricifera from Southeastern United States Coastal Waters [ 6 ]