Our Museum was opened to the public in November 2004, but had long been a dream of Fyodor Shidlovskiy, the museum's founder. An engineer by background, in the late 1980's Fyodor worked for a local airline in northeastern Yakutia, in the small old town of Srednekolymsk on the Kolyma River. He loved that severe and wild country, and was fond of hunting and traveling along the local rivers and through taiga forest. Fyodor knew that this region was rich with fossils, and had heard about the famous Beryozovka Mammoth carcass found not far from Srednekolymsk. Once, in a steep bluff at the Beryozovka River, he found a large limb bone and a tusk of mammoth. That event changed Shidlovskiy's life. Collecting fossils of extinct Pleistocene animals became his hobby, and then a favorite business.