Fire Devastates Brazil's Oldest Science Museum
The overnight inferno likely claimed fossils, cultural
artifacts, and more irreplaceable collections amassed
over 200 years.
By Michael Greshko ______________________________________
PUBLISHED September 6, 2018
Major pieces of Brazil's scientific and cultural heritage
went up in smoke on September 2, as a devastating fire
ripped through much of Rio de Janeiro's Museu
Nacional, or National Museum. Founded in 1818, the
museum is Brazil's oldest scientific institution and one
of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin
America, amassing a collection of some 20 million
scientifically and culturally invaluable artifacts.
The Museu Nacional's holdings include Luzia, an
11,500-year-old skull considered one of South
America's oldest human fossils, as well as the bones of
uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long-necked
dinosaur Maxakalisaurus. Because of the auction tastes
of Brazil's 19th-century emperors, the Museu Nacional
also ended up with Latin America's oldest collection of
Egyptian mummies and artifacts.
Even the building holds historical importance: It housed
the exiled Portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821,
after they fled to Rio de Janeiro in 1807 to escape
Napoleon. The complex also served as the palace for
Brazil's post-independence emperors until 1889, before
the museum collections were transferred there in 1902.
In an September 5 email, Museu Nacional curator
Débora Pires wrote that the entomology and
arachnology collections were completely destroyed, as
was most of the mollusk collection. However,
technicians had braved the fire to save 80 percent of the
mollusk holotypes—the specimens that formally serve
as the global references for a given species. The
museum's vertebrate specimens, herbarium, and library
were housed separately and survived the fire.
(…)
An Irreplaceable Loss
It's not yet clear how the fire started, but it did begin
after the museum was closed to the public, and no
injuries have yet been reported. Firefighters worked
through the night to douse the burnt-out shell of the
main building, but it seems the blaze has already seared
a gaping hole in many scientists' careers.
“The importance of the collections that were lost
couldn't be overstated,” says Luiz Rocha, a Brazilian
ichthyologist now at the California Academy of Sciences who has visited the Museu Nacional several
times to study its collections. “They were unique as it
gets: Many of them were irreplaceable, there's no way
to put a monetary value on it.”
“In terms of [my] life-long research agenda, I'm pretty
much lost,” says Marcus Guidoti, a Brazilian
entomologist finishing up his Ph.D. in a program co-run
by Brazil's Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
Guidoti studies lace bugs, an insect family with more
than 2,000 species worldwide. The Museu Nacional
held one of the world's largest lace bug collections, but
the fire likely destroyed it and the rest of the museum's
five million arthropod specimens. “Those type
specimens can't be replaced, and they are crucial to
understand the species,” he says by text message. “If I
was willing to keep working on this family in this
region of the globe, this was definitely a big hit.”
Paleontologist Dimila Mothé, a postdoctoral researcher
at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro,
adds that the blows to science extend beyond the
collections themselves. “It's not only the cultural
history, the natural history, but all the theses and
research developed there,” she says. “Most of the
laboratories there were lost, too, and the research of
several professors. I'm not sure you can say the impact
of what was lost.”
Brazil’s indigenous knowledge also has suffered. The
Museu Nacional housed world-renowned collections of
indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of
indigenous languages from all over Brazil. Some of
these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are
no longer spoken.
“I have no words to say how horrible this is,” says
Brazilian anthropologist Mariana Françozo, an expert
on South American indigenous objects at Leiden
University. “The indigenous collections are a
tremendous loss … we can no longer study them, we
can no longer understand what our ancestors did. It’s
heartbreaking.”
On Monday, The Brazilian publication G1 Rio reported
that ashes of burned documents—some still flecked in
notes or illustrations—have rained down from the sky
more than a mile away from the Museu Nacional,
thrown aloft by the inferno.
(…)
Editor's Note: This story was updated on September 6,
2018, with new details about which artifacts survived
the fire.
Taken from:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/09/news-museu-nacional-fire-rio-de-janeiro-natural-history/. Access: 11 dez. 2018.
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importance: It housed the exiled Portuguese royal
family from 1808 to 1821, after they fled to Rio de
Janeiro in 1807 to escape Napoleon”, the word IT refers
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