The ice age creatures of Yakutia to display in the U.S.

Oksana Shidlovskaya is in Tucson from Moscow to present a traveling version of her paleontologist husband's Siberian ice age show, which features replicas of ice age animals.

The Ice Age Museum-Theatre in Moscow is the full-time home to the traveling minimuseum.

It's prime exhibit is a replica of a life-size woolly mammoth with real bones and ivory tusks dating from the Pleistocene epoch, a period stretching from more than 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago.

It is covered with yak fur.

The ice age minimuseum is on display at the Tucson Expo Center, 3750 E. Irvington Road, from Friday to Feb. 6.

Dozens of exhibitors are also setting up displays of gems and jewelry at the center, which features an international food court.

Shidlovskaya and her husband, Fyodor Shidlovskiy, who is not in Tucson for the show, are selling replicas of the mammoth.

They also sell jewelry and other items carved from ivory tusks. Selling the ivory is legal in Russia, she said.

The tusks and bones are "farmed" above ground in Yakutia, Siberia, each year as ice melts and the remains buried in the permafrost defrost, float downriver and wash up on riverbanks in July and August, Shidlovskaya said.

// Jan. 25, 2006

By SHERYL KORNMAN
Tucson Citizen.

Museum's website: http://eng.iceage.ru/