My memoir is a unique combination of wilderness adventures, scientific exploration and a hardscrabble early life. It relates my evolution from a working-class childhood through earning a PhD in paleontology, but largely focuses on my three-decade career studying fossil marine mollusks, or seashells, in Alaska, Siberia, and Canadian islands near the North Pole. To earn money for grad school, I worked in places where intellectuals rarely venture: offshore oil drilling platforms in wintertime Alaska and equatorial Africa. My oilfield life was strikingly out of the ordinary, involving inherently dangerous workplaces, unlettered and violent oil rig workers, sixteen ounces of gin and tonic for breakfast, bar room fights, and the occasion to memorize all fifty-six stanzas of Noël Cowards’ Eskimo Nell. As a ten-year-old boy, I read a children’s book about collecting dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, and from then on I was destined to study fossils in the wilderness. I went on to gain international recognition for my research on fossil marine mollusks in the Arctic, achieving many scientific firsts, including dating the opening of Bering Strait. I weave my scientific strivings and discoveries among the adventure tales. During three decades of summer tent camps in the remote northern wilderness, I discovered fossils by helicopter, bush plane and on foot. I had countless encounters, some life-threatening and others charming, with grizzlies, wolves and wolverines. I shot one charging grizzly with my only bullet to save my life; it died a few feet from me. I survived a helicopter crash, a bush plane flight when an engine quit and we headed down into uncharted mountains, a near-drowning, landslides and perishing storms. When alone during one killing storm, I had an ineffable hours-long spiritual experience that took me decades to internalize. When I eventually did, I met my soulmate. Her early death prompted my inquiry into aspects of human consciousness that are rarely addressed by scientists. The arcs in my story include surviving an intensely lonely childhood to live a strongly emotional life of unlikely and extreme adventure; being raised in a working-class family but achieving international recognition for my scientific work; and, evolving from a scientist with a standard mechanistic view of life to one whose spiritual experiences in the Arctic transformed his worldview.