I mean, maybe, but I think that mindset is likely not unique to your country.
Oh, that’s a terrible loss, especially people who study pre-colonial era in Latin American history.
That’s indeed a tragedy.
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Absolutely Inexcusable.
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Usually the stone is a facade, there to keep the wooden frame tinder dry. Most of the houses and building in my area are exactly that, and boy do they go up when they catch on fire.
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That’s horrifying. So much history lost in the blink of an eye
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Why don’t banks holding student loan or mortgage debt records ever burn down?
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I am Brazilian and the Museum was a big part of my life. I have been collecting and verifying information since Sunday. Ask me anything.
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The loss is gigantic. All was lost. Rare audio recordings of extinct languages dating from the 1940s were lost. Native people cried in front of the museum.
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It’s a global tragedy. People from the entire world used the museum to research. One of the biggest losses: 50% of the world’s best preserved pterodactyls were there. Yes, from the entire known world. Paleontologists in the field are going crazy.
People have difficulty understanding the size of the loss. It was the 5th biggest museum in the world. The biggest in pre-Columbian archeology artifacts and research. But it was much more than just native or local culture. Entomology lost hundreds of thousands of specimens. The entire invertebrates library was lost. There are researchers that lost 40 years of work. A freaking Pompeii fresco was lost.
It’s on par with Alexandria’s fire. The world has lost so much knowledge the mind boggles at the scale.
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One of the reasons it survived was its position at the open entrance of the building. It was in front of the ticketing booth, an area that was always open to visitors. It even shielded its marble pedestal from the destruction.
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We were enticed to touch the meteor with our own hands and feel it. See the criss-cross pattern. And smell the tips of our fingers and feel the metallic twinge in them. I went there as young as 6 years old and yearly with my school and many times as an adult, then took my son there. I can close my eyes and feel its smell clear as day. It was the first experience in interacting with a museum piece many of us had in our lives.
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Absolutely agree.
That’s the crazy thing, that people assume that all of our knowledge is accessibly through the internet now, but so much of it is not. There are some many things, like this collection that you can replicate online and that are irreplaceable. People just don’t get that.
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The entomologists I know are devastated; Brazil had one of the oldest and most complete insect collections on earth.
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If anything good comes from this, I hope that it is that there is a push to archive and distribute everything that can be backed up to multiple locations for all museum collections. Rare recordings can be digitized and distributed. Artifacts 3D scanned. Written works and flat art works scanned and distributed.
Of course it won’t prevent some knowledge from being lost, but it will limit the destruction.
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A very good point, about the need for “backups”. But will the funding be available, given politicians’ short-termist approach to everything and their focus only on votes and power? In a rational world, preserving and protecting human and planetary knowledge would be a high priority, but even those who run museums (whose job this preservation and protection actually is) aren’t alive to the need for, or prepared to prioritise “backups”. When they can’t even get funds for a decent fire protection system, what hope is there?
I am reminded of:
Schofield’s Second Law of Computing states that data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.
I rather think that museum “data” is similar.
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People are finding documents and even burnt specimens in neighborhoods far from the Nacional Museum. The wind carried all these things through the sky.
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I’ve been in the back rooms there a couple of times, long ago, and I can scarcely imagine that we haven’t burnt one down yet.
And the Smithsonian was way better than the Natural History museum I used to work for.
We had a new fire marshal visit, and he was very full of himself and wanted to throw his authoritye around, but was over his head ten minutes into the visit.
“Why are there steel fire doors here?”
“Because there are over three million jars in that building, holding around five hundred thousand gallons of alcohol, preserving specimens. And the most important collection of dried plant specimens in the Western hemisphere is on the top floor.”
“Uh, OK, I need to go look some things up, I’ll be back later.”
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How many aliens?
Anyone drown their kid and tried to hide the body among the specimens hoping no one would notice?
If the answer is “no”, how can you be sure?
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Possibly apocryphal rumor has it that there used to be a couple of pickled pygmies in there, amongst other things, and that they were either secretly buried in the courtyard or given to the Mütter long ago.
But I don’t know of any pygmy corpses on display at the Mütter, and when the courtyard was dug up in the 90s the only really interesting bones found were a giraffe’s.
I once found a weird large yellow parchmenty thing in an extremely fancy stainless steel box full of alcohol. Nobody knew where it came from, so I went to each of the department heads with it on a little cart and said “is this yours, or do you at least know what it is?” When I got to the late Fred Ulmer in Mammalogy, he looked up calmly and said “Oh, that’s a hippopotamus stomach, we’ve been wondering where that got to.”
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The Museu Nacional actually had shrunk heads. Even as an adult and understanding the cultural aspects of it I was both amazed by their minuscule size and fully creeped by them. No pickled pigmy in exposition, maybe hidden in the archives. https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/NxDFJhBswJLhmeJxA_tU2juhTd6ghzo8hbupWve0qyxuwdH8dxB9vFSwaDEOrXrbay73r4by8DWkBmdDYDUaD8aaG5x0SPs=w443-h332-nc
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The Museu employees have released a notice asking everyone in the vicinity of the building to keep and preserve any remains they find because they must be very important in the near future.
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