Fyodor Shidlovskiy and Mike Triebold don't know each other from a hole in the ground, but they share an undying passion for long-dead and buried beasts.

Each summer Shidlovskiy mounts a safari of men, buses, trucks, amphibious vehicles, planes, helicopters, and riverboats and ventures onto the tundra of northeastern Siberia. In the extended Arctic daylight, he and his team spend weeks at a stretch recovering the bones and tusks of woolly mammoths, the lumbering precursors of today's elephants that until about 10,000 years ago wandered the bitterly cold steppes alongside our own fur-clad ancestors.

The best of his finds he restores (with auto body filler and varnish) and assembles into complete skeletons. Bones and tusks of lesser quality he has carved into