A fire which broke out on Sunday evening at the
National Museum of Brazil in
Rio de Janeiro has ravaged some of the country’s most important scientific collections. Nearly 20 million items are now irreparably destroyed by what was started by either an electrical short-circuit due to budget cuts or a homemade paper hot-air balloon that may have landed on the roof, said Brazil's Culture Minister Sergio Leitao.
Having been founded before Brazil’s independence from Portugal 200 years ago (1808), the museum housed ancient Egypt, Greek, and Roman artifacts and important paleontology and natural history collections, including one of Latin America’s oldest human fossils: the 11,500-year-old skull called
Luzia (shown below). The
Luzia skull was collected in the 1970s, and was kept in a metal case, so researchers say there’s a possibility it may have survived the fire.
The full extent of the damage isn’t yet clear. Some vertebrate specimens and some of the botany collection were housed in a separate building that was not affected by the fire. But millions of specimens, including the museum’s globally important invertebrate collection, were destroyed.