Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Felipe Cohen / Project Museu Nacional Vive.
Clean-up crews have treated the site like an archaeological dig, combing for remnants from the fire and also discovering new finds previously hidden underneath the museum. 

For scientists around the world, too much that was irreplaceable was lost in the great fire at Brazil’s national museum in 2018. That hasn’t stopped Brazilians from trying to rebuild, and in the process, they have discovered new artifacts under the building.

Joel Balsam writes at Smithsonian magazine, “The news arrived with both excitement and a pang of grief: The oldest national history museum in the Americas was slated to partially reopen for the first time since a 2018 fire destroyed more than 16 million objects — 80 percent of its collections. ‘We put out tickets; it sold out in hours,’ says Ronaldo Fernandes, director of the 208-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

“Before the fire, some 300,000 Brazilian schoolchildren visited the museum each year. My partner had been one of them, so I got us free tickets to the temporary exhibition in September 2025. The building, Paço São Cristóvão, was a former residence of Portuguese and Brazilian monarchs, and it was as regal as she remembered it. We found that the yellow-and-white facade had been restored, along with 30 statues of Greek gods that adorned the roofline. Inside, the Bendegó meteorite, a 11,820-pound space rock found in Brazil in 1784, had survived the flames and was still on display in the entry room.

“But noticeable changes were everywhere. Some walls remained blackened from the flames. Steel support beams were still twisted and exposed. On the positive side of the experience, we saw new acquisitions, including a 51-and-a-half-foot-long sperm whale skeleton that hung from a fresh 138-glass-panel skylight. … The museum is still rebuilding its spaces and collections, targeting a 2029 reopening date. …

“The morning after the fire, hundreds of people gathered outside the museum’s gates to see the extent of the damage. When some tried to jump the fence, the police responded with tear gas and pepper spray. The outer walls, which had been solidly built by enslaved Africans, remained intact. But historian Regina Dantas remembers entering her third-floor office. … ‘I lost everything — I didn’t have a pen.’

“Items stored in nearby buildings were safe from the blaze: Torah scrolls from the 13th or 14th century, the vertebrate and herbarium collections and a 500,000-volume library. Some researchers dashed into the main building during the fire’s early stages and saved precious specimens that had been used to define entire species. …

Losses included Egyptian mummies, a royal Hawaiian feather cloak gifted to Brazil’s last regent, audio recordings of Indigenous languages no longer spoken and the museum’s entire insect collection.

“A nonprofit called Projeto Museu Nacional Vive — or The National Museum Is Alive — is raising funds for the museum’s reopening, with backing from UNESCO, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Vale Cultural Institute. But the project is still about $29 million short. …

“Brazil’s Ministry of Education provided about $2.35 million so the rebuilding could begin right away. Crews sifted through the rubble layer by layer, treating the palace like an archaeological site in hopes that some items had survived the fire. Crews found a shard of a French vase gifted to Emperor Dom Pedro II, and, miraculously, the skull of Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas. About 5,000 artifacts recovered from the wreckage are being restored by archaeologists, a process that could take decades. …

“When cleanup crews reached the final layer of rubble, they encountered a surprise: the foundations of a chapel built in 1840 and destroyed in 1910. ‘We knew all the time there was a chapel there … and now we found it,’ says Fernandes. The fire also uncovered bricks from earlier periods, as well as layers of wallpaper not seen since the exile of Brazil’s last monarch, in 1889. …

“The reopened museum will showcase the chapel ruins and exposed bricks. The museum also plans to maintain some charred walls and exposed beams to commemorate the tragedy. …

“All the while, new artifacts are coming in — more than 16,700 to date. Burkhard Pohl, a Swiss-German collector who maintains one of the world’s largest fossil collections, donated 1,105 fossils from the Araripe Basin, in northern Brazil, that date back 115 million years. The National Museum of Denmark has also returned a Tupinambá feather cloak taken from Brazil in 1689. …

“The museum doesn’t simply want to redo its collections as they were. Like many 19th-century institutions, it featured numerous stolen artifacts and neglected to consult the Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans whose cultures help make up the country’s history.”

More at Smithsonian, here. I’m cheered by these efforts, but I still can still hear entomology professor and photographer Alex Wild lamenting the permanent loss of the vast insect collecrtion. It will never be the same.

By the way, I wrote in 2022 about how Brazil is bringing its indigenous communities into the rebuilding process. Read that post here.

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