ST PETERSBURG (Russia) • Standing alone, a few minutes before the doors were to open at the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Zoological Institute, Dr Alexei Tikhonov gazed at Masha, a 30,000-year-old baby mammoth that he brought here from Siberia 30 years ago.

Masha, one of the museum's star attractions, rests with hundreds of other encased exhibits in one of the largest public collections of zoological specimens in the world. The cabinets, conceived in Frankfurt at the end of the 19th century, and the Czarist hunting trophies here exude an old-fashioned, even romantic air. But Dr Tikhonov, director of the museum, is not too concerned.