Lou Marincovich, PhD, is a paleontologist who has spent his life researching fossil sea shells of the past sixty-five million years in wild and dangerous places like Alaska, Siberia and up by the North Pole.
His journey began at age ten with a book about an American paleontologist who uncovered dinosaurs in the wilds of Asia. Something clicked in Lou’s working-class brain and he took off toward a PhD in geology. He switched to mollusks because they’re more interesting and easier to dig up.
During his thirty-four years with the U.S. Geological Survey and the California Academy of Sciences he accomplished big things. Biggest of all, he solved the century-old mystery of when Bering Strait opened to join the Arctic and Pacific oceans for the first time in a hundred million years. He showed that the Arctic’s climate has heated and cooled over time. He proved that ancient mollusk species everyone else said had died out with the dinosaurs lived happily for millions of years in the Arctic Ocean without anyone being the wiser. He discovered and named the Spirit River in remotest Alaska to reflect his feelings about the Arctic.
Along the way, Lou had numerous adventures you’ve never heard of before in places you’ve never been. To start with, he worked on oil rigs in wintertime Alaska for nearly a year, and in West Africa for 375 days, 10 hours and 18 minutes to pay for graduate school. He almost died in a rig accident and his adventures are over-the-top colorful and often shocking. The pay wasn’t worth it, but the adventures were.
Once out of school, he spent the next thirty-four summers camped out among the grizzlies and wolves in the Far North. The Arctic was virgin territory for fossil-hunting back then and he routinely cheated death to find new fossil beds, such as being dropped off by a helicopter sixty miles from any other human, then being trapped by an atrociously violent storm that nearly did him in. He shot a charging grizzly with his only bullet, nearly died crossing icy rivers, was surrounded by wolves (more gunplay), escaped a landslide by jumping into a boat, and survived a helicopter crash. He was fortunate to work in the Arctic and lucky to live through it all. Good luck finding another memoir by a poetry-quoting intellectual who’s worked on oil rigs, shot a grizzly and flown upside down in a helicopter!
Lou had so many Indiana Jones-style adventures that he should have thought of writing a memoir, but never did until his soulmate asked him to pass along the lifelong inspiration that he found as a child in the pages of a book. His memoir is True North: Hunting Fossils Under the Midnight Sun.
If you’d like to see field photos from a paleontologist’s life, check out the Photo Gallery. Lou has authored more than 100 scientific articles and books.