In this photo taken Wednesday, November 26, 2014 attack dogs and their handlers apprehend a “rhino poacher” center, after alighting from a helicopter into water, in a simulation exercise showing training at an academy run by the Paramount Group, near Rustenburg, South Africa. The course prepares canine units to find firearms or contraband, track suspects in the undergrowth and abseil in harnesses from helicopters in pursuit of poachers. Dogs and handlers learn to trust each other and fine tune a relationship balancing control and aggression. (Photo by Denis Farrell/AP Photo)

South Korean divers prepare to plunge through a hole in the ice of the frozen Imjin River on January 16, 2005 in Yeonchun, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Members of the South Korean Special Weapons and Tactics team exhibit their skill during anti-terrorism exercises at a training camp on May 30, 2005 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung Jun/Getty Images)

Settled snow is seen covering houses and Cecil Peak on New Zealand's lower South Island on November 4, 2011 in Queenstown, New Zealand. The unseasonal weather is not expected to clear until tomorrow, with snow continuing to fall. (Photo by Teaukura Moetaua/Getty Images)

Attendees wear a cardboard “Facebox” at the 2017 South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, U.S., on Monday, March 13, 2017. The SXSW Interactive Festival features a variety of tracks that allow attendees to explore what's next in the worlds of entertainment, culture, and technology. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

In this Thursday, January 17, 2019, photo, an Indian tamer reacts as a bull charges towards him during a traditional bull-taming festival called Jallikattu, in the village of Allanganallur, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu state, India. Jallikattu involves releasing a bull into a crowd of people who are expected to hang on to the animal's hump for a stipulated distance or hold on to the hump for a minimum of three jumps made by the bull. The sport, performed during the four-day “Pongal” or winter harvest festival, is hugely popular in Tamil Nadu. (Photo by Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

On July 7, Chinese archaeologists from the Academy of Social Sciences announced that they have reconstituted a 5,300-year-old Mongolion pottery statue found at a relic site in North China, according to Xinhua news agency.