Valuable collections lost in fire
ON Sunday, September 2, 2018, a huge fire engulfed Brazil’s national museum, housed in beautiful St Christopher’s Palace in Rio de Janeiro. It destroyed not only Brazil’s most treasured cultural artefacts and biological specimens of world importance, but obliterated a worldfamous centre of scientific research.
Before I transferred some New Zealand and Australian spider wasp species into the genus
Sphictostethus, first described for a South American wasp, I had to borrow specimens worldwide for comparative purposes, these included 32 from this museum, from which I still have the original loan form. I cite this as an example of how properly labelled and identified museum specimens are of global scientific importance. Tragically, all of the Brazilian museum’s more than two million insects, and five million invertebrates were destroyed in this fire.
St Christopher’s Palace was originally used as a residence for the Portuguese royal family (180821). It next housed the Brazilian imperial family (182289) and then the Republican Constitutional Assembly (18891892), before housing the museum in 1892.
The National Museum of Brazil was founded by King Jofo VI of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in 1818 as the ‘‘Royal Museum’’, which later shifted to the palace in 1892. After 1941, the museum was run by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The museum contained more than 20 million objects, including particularly valuable collections in natural science and anthropology. These took 200 years to build through expeditions, acquisitions, gifts and exchanges. The core areas were zoology, botany, mineralogy, palaeontology (including the world’s largest pterosaur collection, rich in holotypes), anthropology, ethnology and archaeology. The museum carried out academic research worldwide. Its outstanding scientific journal Archivos do Museu
Nacional has been published continuously since 1876.
Brazil’s National Museum was the most important scientific institution in Latin America and ranked in importance with the (US) Field Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.
Such great national institutions, which house the material underpinnings of a nation’s culture, are the corporeal embodiment of a nation’s identity. Accordingly, they are of incalculable value and should be funded by government almost before anything else. Three decades of neoliberalism worldwide have resulted in museums and other cultural institutions being tragically neglected.
For more than 30 years, Brazil grossly underfunded its national museum, despite spending billions to host the 2016 Olympic Games.
Brazil was planning a ‘‘museum of the future’’ — let’s hope it instead rebuilds its invaluable natural historyanthropology museum and research centre, this time ensuring by law it is adequately funded.
In light, also, of the recent destruction by fire of several great naturalhistory museums (e.g., India’s National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi, destroyed on April 24, 2016), an international agency (Unesco?) should be tasked without delay to give support and protection where required to the world’s chief naturalhistory museums, whose collections are used by scientists all over the world.