What makes a scientist? In this charming, funny, and wise memoir, Richard Fortey shows how restless curiosity about the natural world led him to become a paleontologist and writer, with adventures and misadventures along the way. From a garden shed laboratory where he manufactured the greatest stink in the world to a tent high in the Arctic in pursuit of fossils, Fortey looks back on a 50-year career, and unfolds how his early passions—fungi, ammonite hunting, bird's eggs—started out as his playground and refuge, then became his life's work.

"Truth and courage are what memoirs need and this one has them both in spades."—Adam Nicolson