“It’s as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art burned down,” he said.
He was responding to a question about Luzia, the name given to 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.
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.
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.
Marcus Guidoti, a Brazilian entomologist and former researcher at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, says it is likely that about a quarter of the Brazilian lace bug holotypes, or unique specimens used to describe a species, were 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.”
Mummies, from Egypt and South America, as well as Egyptian artefacts, were another specialty of the museum.
But Dalton de Souza Amorim, a professor of biology at the University of Sao Paulo, said, “The anthropological collections were the worst loss.” Among them, he said, were the only recordings of people whose nations have disappeared.
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.”
Amorim agreed. “What is the value of the cultural heritage of a country?” he asked. “It is beyond value.”
© 2018 New York Times News Service