David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said he had struggled to think of an appropriate way to understand the destruction of Brazil’s National Museum by fire.
“It’s as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art burned down,” he said.
He was responding to a question about Luzia, one of the oldest examples of human remains in the Americas. It may have been lost in the fire on Sunday night, and it was certainly damaged. But his reaction was to the extent of the loss, not the specimen itself.
As valuable as that specimen was to those who study the peopling of the Americas, it was almost trivial in comparison to the vast scope of the museum, which was a cultural and scientific treasure. Science museums are not only displays of what we have learned, but also chances to learn so much more from studying the specimens stored there.
The Luzia fossil, for instance, is the skull of a woman who lived 11,500 years ago in Brazil. It is valuable to science not just because it is rare and has already told us much about who lived in the Americas, but also because of how much more it could say.
Dr. Reich is a specialist in ancient human DNA, using such material to study our species’ migrations around the planet. He was unaware of any retrieval of DNA from the Luzia fossil. But while no sufficiently preserved DNA has so far been reported from bones older than 1,000 years in South America, technology for the study of ancient DNA is advancing by leaps and bounds and a specimen like Luzia might have concealed genetic secrets.
Michael Novacek, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said that museums maintain “our tangible record of life on earth.” A great collection, he said, is like new terrain to explore, a place of rediscovery, where new studies of old objects yield new truths.
Much of the entomology collection at the museum in Brazil was lost, including dragonflies and beetles. Part of its collection was of lace bugs, which was preserved in no other museum.
Marcus Guidoti, a Brazilian entomologist and former researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, says it’s likely that about a quarter of Brazilian lace bug holotypes, or unique specimens used to describe a species, was lost in the fire.
“The Smithsonian collection on lace bugs is the biggest in the world,” he said, but he said that because of a feud between an American and a Brazilian scientist, it has “a big hole: South America.”
There was at least one object that survived the fire, one of the world’s largest meteorites. It had been through worse.
Mummies, from Egypt and South America, as well as Egyptian artifacts, were another specialty of the museum.
But Dalton de Souza Amorim, a professor of biology at the University of São Paulo, said, “The anthropological collections were the worst loss.” Among them, he said, were the only recordings of people whose nations have disappeared.
Huge collections of feather work and masks from indigenous peoples of South America were also consumed in the fire, as well as pottery and artifacts of a culture that made shell mounds along what is now Brazil’s Atlantic Coast for thousands of years.
While some of the biological collections may be replenished, this cultural history is simply gone. Carlos Fausto, a professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said this material memory of Brazilian history was “just irreplaceable.”
Dr. Amorim agreed. “What is the value of the cultural heritage of a country?” he asked. “It is beyond value.”
Manuela Andreoni contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.