EVERY BONE-LOVING Starsky needs a bone-loving Hutch, and Villemarette has his in Joey Williams, the museum's 33-year-old educational director. With his swept-back red hair and freckles, Joey looks like the Eric Stoltz of the skeleton set. He's worked with Villemarette for a couple of years but has known him since 1991. Neither man has a Ph.D. Villemarette is self-taught, a high school graduate. Williams majored in biology at a small state university in Kansas. Together they're like two kids on an adventure, answering questions for each other, chiming in constantly.

Williams, who's with us inside the museum, points at the killer whale skeleton. "Look at the fingers there," he says, showing me the flipper bones. "It's got a hand. Now, why would God put five fingers in a flipper? He wouldn't. Clearly, this animal used to have hands."

"Exactly," says Villemarette. "It grew up on land and then crawled back into the water."

It's true. The killer whale (actually a species of dolphin) has the hands of a piano player, with five slender digits. Biologists hypothesize that whales and dolphins, mammals both, evolved from land-based creatures that returned to the sea 50 million years ago. But evolution can be a tricky topic in Oklahoma, and some visitors who come through might want to debate that sort of thing. Villemarette and Williams say they'll let the bones speak for themselves. "We don't want to argue," says Williams.

"We're scientists," adds Villemarette, as if that term implies not arguing.

Skulls Unlimited—which everybody shorthands as "Skulls"—employs 13 people, including Michelle Hayer and Allyson Reed, two women who answer phones in the shipping room. Stacked high around them are boxes of bones, stamped with the words THE WORLD'S LEADING SUPPLIER OF OSTEOLOGICAL SPECIMENS. The headquarters for all this is a five-acre mini-campus housed in two large, mostly windowless buildings. The museum space is fronted by a gift shop, where you can buy souvenirs like rodent skulls and Skulls coffee mugs. Across the parking lot is the processing building, home of the "skeleton crew," where carcasses go in and finished skeletons come out.

Who are the customers? Hollywood calls a lot. Bones from Skulls have appeared in Shanghai Noon, The Flintstones, and Pet Sematary II. Villemarette says movie people tend to ask for more bones than they end up taking—the classic kid-in-a-bone-store reaction. The producers of The 13th Warrior, for instance, called to order 20,000 pounds of cow bones but bought only 5,000 pounds—or so Villemarette estimates. "It was a big old pile, I'll tell you that," he says.

Nature centers call all the time, too, as do medical schools and prominent museums. Skulls has sent skeletons to the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., which recently bought a zebra skeleton. The Smithsonian has its own taxidermists, but they don't "articulate" skeletons, a Skulls specialty that involves gluing joints, drilling and wiring bones, and welding custom stands.

"Skulls Unlimited is probably the leader in the field," says Randall Kremer, a Smithsonian spokesman. "If you can really call it a field. There probably aren't many competitors out there."