For comparison, the remaining 90 percent includes twice as many specimens as the entire British Museum. But together, these reportedly account for just 10 percent of the museum’s collection. The museum’s herbarium, its main library, and some of its vertebrates were housed in a different building that was untouched by the fire. Marina Silva, a candidate in Brazil’s upcoming elections, described the fire as “ a lobotomy in Brazilian memory.” “Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge have been lost.” The losses are “incalculable to Brazil,” said Michel Temer, the country’s president, on Twitter. “Other tragedies like this can happen any time in numerous museums, libraries, and archives in Brazil.” “This was an announced tragedy,” added Ana Lucia Araujo, a Brazilian-born historian at Howard University, on Twitter. “For many years, we fought with different governments to get adequate resources to preserve what is now completely destroyed,” Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte, the museum’s deputy director, has said. It was recently forced to crowdfund money to repair the termite-damaged base of one of its grandest mounted dinosaurs.
#Lost ruins in brazil full
Over the past five years, the museum faced severe cuts and didn’t even receive its full allotted funds from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Recognizing these problems in the 1990s, museum staff began planning to move the collection to a different site, but without stable funding, those plans proceeded in fits and starts. It had long suffered from obvious infrastructure problems including leaks, termite infestations, and-crucially-no working sprinkler system. The burned building was the largest natural-history museum in Latin America, but it had never been completely renovated in its 200-year history. Just as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem was about the consequences of hubris, the museum’s ruins could be seen as a testament to neglect.
Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away. Looking at pictures of the meteorite, as it stands intact on its pedestal amid the surrounding wreckage, I’m reminded of the final lines of Ozymandias: Nothing beside remains. And having once survived the heat of falling through the atmosphere, the Bendegó meteorite also seems to have survived the fire that tore through the museum on Sunday evening, destroying an as-yet-unquantified proportion of its 20 million specimens. The 11,600-pound rock was so cumbersome to transport that it took people almost a century to get it to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where it has since been on proud display. In 1784, a Brazilian boy who was looking for a lost cow found a gigantic meteorite instead.
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