Museum halls

Two huge bears - white and brown - meet visitors at the entrance to the Museum. As its founder Fyodor Shidlovskiy says, this is a museum-theatre. You pass between shaggy monsters and arrive in the Arctic steppe, where no trees grow and grassland and blue lakes are all around.

A huge mammoth and ferocious woolly rhino are grazing along the shores in their heavy fur garments. Complete skeletons of these beasts are mounted nearby.

Mammoth skulls, tusks, teeth and limb bones are scattered everywhere. An impressive collection of woolly rhino skulls and horns, and horse and bison skulls, decorates the walls. Genuine mammoth hair and prehistoric bison skin are treasures found in Siberian permafrost.

You enter another hall through a dark, mysterious passage made of mammoth bones, mandibles and tusks. This is an imitation of primitive constructions that early humans built on the Russian Plain as dwelling or ritual huts. One big mammoth fell down the crafty humans' trap and is trying to get out.

You can hear its terrible roar. The light effects remind you sometimes of the polar aurora, sometimes of a sandy storm.

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