MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian surgeon who had an accident at his dacha country house asked colleagues to experiment on him by rebuilding his mangled right thumb with a piece of pelvic bone, Itar-Tass news agency said on Sunday. The operation last week on Valery Agafonov, chief surgeon at the main hospital in Perm, was a success, Tass said. "As a rule, a patient with such an injury is prepared for a big toe transplant, but Agafonov decided on an experiment," the agency reported from Perm, a city in the Urals mountains of central Russia. It said one of his micro-surgeon colleagues extracted a piece of bone from Agafonov's pelvis and transplanted it together with a piece of skin from the wrist of his left hand. Bank officials "found Agafonov's signature exactly the same as before his operation", Tass said.