STANDING OUTSIDE the processing building, I hear a drill screaming in bursts. "Come on in," says Humphries, a clean-cut guy with a constant smile.

Inside, stretched out on the cement floor, is the skeleton of a 30-foot gray whale, legally harpooned in 1999 by the Makah Indians of Washington State. The skull is wedge-shaped, about seven feet long, and features a ragged hole above the eye, where the harpoon went in. Skulls employee Clark Griffith is hunched over a football-size vertebra, drilling it with a spade bit, filling the room with bone dust. He'll spend more than 170 hours putting this skeleton together, at a total cost to the Makah of around $11,000.

Humphries says he came to Skulls in a roundabout way: He was an art student looking for a human skull to draw,

The odor in the processing building shivering nostrils. "You'll smell like death all day," Eric Humphries says cheerfully.

and one thing led to another. As he talks, he picks up a length of bone and starts tapping his left palm with it. I ask him what it is. "Oh," he says, "that's a humerus." He holds it against his upper arm for comparison. So it is.

Human skeletons come through Skulls all the time, mostly bound for medical purposes. The current asking price for an articulated skeleton is $3,700. Villemarette gets all his human skeletons from companies in China, which handle supply and sourcing on that end. He has no idea what their sources are.

Humphries puts the bone down and we resume the tour. In another part of the room, there are stainless-steel lab tables, vats, tools, and bones everywhere. The smell is a combination of powerful chemicals and decomposing tissue. It shivers the nostrils. "You'll smell like death all day," Humphries says cheerfully.

Dale Dorsey, who oversees animal flensing (flesh removal), is sitting in an office chair, talking on the phone. He waves hello with an enormous mallet. When Dale is flensing, he's stationed by a sink in the corner, either wielding a knife or operating a powerful vacuum that Villemarette designed and built himself. It's used to suck out brains.

We move into a small, windowless chamber, where some three dozen large terrariums are filled with brown dermestid beetles—millions of them, chewing away. New skulls and bones are placed in the tanks, and, in about a week, the beetles eat every particle of flesh in every nook. Humphries picks up a dog's skull, points into the nostrils, and says, "No way could we clean in there."

After the bugs have done their damnedest, the bones are dropped in vats of hydrogen peroxide in the outer room, then they go into a barrel of acetone, which dissolves the bones' natural oils. After that, it's back into the peroxide for another 24 hours and then out to Griffith, who articulates the skeleton and sprays on lacquer. Hippo or human, at Skulls everybody gets treated the same.