11,000 years ’ worth of artifacts blend in up in smoke as the 200 - yr - older National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro — one of the orotund solicitation in the Americas — burned down in a monumental firestorm on Sunday night .
grant to theRio Times , account indicate that every piece from the museum ’s assemblage of over 20 million items that was not stored offsite or rushed out could be destroyed :
other reports point that the museum ’s Brobdingnagian collection of more than twenty million rare and diachronic object , include South American archaeological artifact , meteorite , fossils , and the big collection of Egyptian artifacts in Latin America , were misplace .
“ We have no idea how it start ! ” exclaim a museum researcher to Globo news program . “ There is so much love for this institution , ” she said fight through tears . “ [ T]his 200 year - old museum , this is the work of many people ’s life , zoological ingathering , botanical collections , everything lose … everything lose ! ”
No serious injury are reported . The fire started at 7:30pm ET , with the cause indecipherable , and museum functionary have to wait for firefighters to finish clearing the structure before they can assess the damage , CNN spell .
point in the building included Latin America ’s most panoptic Egyptian aggregation , pre - Columbian artefact , the oldest human remains ever discovered in the Americas ( “ Luzia ” ) , dinosaur castanets , extensive biology exhibits , and a monolithic scientific library . Here ’s a few other things that were stack away in the building , according to theNew York Times :
One ofthe world ’s largest meteorite , which was find in 1784 and had been on display since 1888 .
… item froma large swatch of Brazilian cultures , includingfuneral urnsfrom around the year 1000 in the part of the Maracá River , statue and vases fromthe Santarém culturein the region of the low-spirited Tapajós River , amortarfrom the Trombetas River area and arare mummy obtain in Brazil .
… AGreco - Roman collectionwith more than 700 slice that arrived in Brazil in the 1850s .
… A vastbird collectionalmost 200 years old , representing the chain seen in Brazil .
( The meteorite was among the detail that may have survived the fervidness . )
allot to the BBC , at least some part of the construction where animal specimen were stored survived integral , while theGuardian reportedother function of the archive stored in another building were undamaged .
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Museum staff were able to rush in , in some cases sock down doors , and save some items . Professor Paulo Buckup , an expert in Pisces science , told the BBC he rescued “ a few thousand ” mollusk specimens , bring , “ I do n’t know how many tens of thousands of louse and crustacean were lost . I palpate very dark for my workfellow , some of whom have worked here for 30 or 40 old age . Now all grounds of their work is lost , their life have drop off meaning , too . ”
“ This is 200 years of work of a scientific institution — the most crucial one in Latin America , ” longtime museum employee Marco Aurelio Caldas assure Agencia Brasil , per CNN . “ Everything is finished . Our work , our animation was all in there . ”
Brazil has been facing years of recessional and subversion malicious gossip , with both the Union and state authorities fight with monolithic budget shortfalls . According to the BBC , museum staff say lack of financial support had result the museum in poor precondition , and around a third of the building ’s 30 exhibition Hall were keep out down due to financial constraints at the time of the fire .
Vice manager Luiz Duarte told TV Globo the fire was an “ unendurable catastrophe , ” accord to the Guardian .
“ For many years we struggle with unlike government to get adequate resources to preserve what is now entirely destroyed , ” Duarte tot up . “ My feeling is of total dismay and immense wrath . ”
Update 12:50pm ET : Here ’s some more setting on just how negligent the Brazilian governance ’s superintendence of the museum ’s budget was in recent class , courtesy of National Geographic :
Since 2014 , the Museu Nacional has n’t received its full $ 128,000 maintenance budget ; this year , it received a paltry $ 13,000 . In 2015 , the Museu Nacionalwas forced to close its doors temporarilybecause it could no longer devote its cleansing and security department faculty . The museum ’s curatorshad to crowdfund repairsto termite damage in one of the most popular display antechamber , which contained the skeleton of a hunchback whale and clappers from the dinosaur Maxakalisaurus .
In May 2018 — on the eve of its 200th anniversary — ten of the museum ’s 30 exhibits were close to the public because of disrepair . At the prison term , the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Pauloreportedthat the museum had flake walls and display electrical wiring .
[ CNN / Rio Times ]
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