AS A SPECIMEN, JAY VILLEMARETTE is fairly unremarkable, though when he's viewed from the front, his cranial radius does seem a bit large. Other than that, as the 40-year-old stands before you with his largish head, blue eyes, and goatee, there's nothing to suggest he's the king of the bone business, the largest dealer of skulls and skeletons in all creation, a convicted but avowedly reformed wildlife smuggler (more about that later), and, in his own way, a visionary with a strange and redemptive dream.

As president and founder of Oklahoma City–based Skulls Unlimited International, Villemarette is the premier name in bone cleaning and assembly, turning unwanted carcasses of every kind into gleaming skeletons—and grossing more than a million dollars a year in the process. Now, inside an 8,000-square-foot building on the developing outskirts of town, he's augmenting his core operation by creating the Museum of Osteology, a monument to the beauty and power of bones. It's set two miles down the road from a Valero mini-mart, amid cattle blinking in their fields. If all goes well, the ribbon cutting will happen sometime in the middle of 2007.

"I want kids and researchers to come here," says Villemarette. "I want this to be the best skeleton collection in the world. I've spent 32 years on this, and now it's all coming together."

He's almost finished the building, the hub of a project that will cost him at least $750,000. The

The museum will showcase a skeletal "pioneer family" in a wagon drawn by skeletal horses, with a skeletal dog nipping their legs.

skeletons are ready to go—there are roughly 80 in here already, lined up against the walls on wheeled stands, arranged in lifelike poses. Among the specimens—all of which Villemarette says he obtained legally through a worldwide network of collectors, hunters, and zookeepers—there's a white-sided dolphin leaping through the air, an African lion about to grab an eland, a rhino, a giraffe, a killer whale, a hippopotamus, and a king penguin.

Others are on the way. A big-game-trip packager from Tulsa recently donated an enormous elephant bull, sans ivory, which was shot by his daughter during a 2005 hunt in Botswana. There's also a 44-foot humpback whale lying under horse manure on a friend's spread in rural Pennsylvania. The friend brought it from Cape Cod after it beached. Villemarette will fetch that one himself, flying out and driving his smelly prize back in a U-Haul.

Over the museum's entrance, Villemarette plans to display a flying flock of skeletal birds. He'd like to hang a 40-foot sei whale at the mezzanine level. On the ground floor, he wants to display a skeletal "pioneer family" in a wagon, pulled by wo skeletal horses, with a skeletal dog nipping at their legs. To Villemarette, such a display would be neither tacky nor weird but cool and educational.

"This is what I love," he says, looking around and contemplating his own destiny, like Hamlet with Yorick's skull. "I've got maybe 20 or 30 years left on the earth, and I'm going to enjoy it."