Brazil: National Museum Launches First Exhibition After Fire

The Brazilian National Museum inaugurated, on Wednesday, its first exposition after the serious fire that destroyed its headquarters in September. The exposition is called: "When not everything was ice, new discoveries in the Antarctic continent."

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This exposition "shows that the Museum is still alive and continues to fulfill its function," stated the president of the Brazilian National Museum, Alexander Kellner. The exposition has been prepared in another seat of the museum, the house of the coin of Rio de Janeiro, but has been put together by the National Museum team.

The exposition is focused on the Antarctica and shows the work of paleontologists in the continent. It is made out of fossils, tools such as drills and brushes, used by the researches that worked in the Antarctica.  The most impressive piece of the exposition, according to the researcher Juliana Sayao, is a Pterosaur's fossil, a flying reptile which is recorded for the first time in Antarctica in the Cretaceous period.

Only one percent (six) of the pieces that the exposition offers, were recovered from the museum after the fire that destroyed most of the artifacts in the principal headquarters. This exposition was supposed to begin in October and was planned for a long time, which is why the team decided to continue with the process.

Approximately 90 percent of the museum's collections, and items lent by other museums, were lost in the fire on September 2. However, around 1,500 signed artifacts were salvaged, including the oldest known human fossil in the Americas, the skull of Luzia, the star of the 200-year-old museum’s collection. The skull lost 20 percent of its mass but was saved in part by a cabinet that fell over the fossil’s glass encasing.

The museum, the oldest and largest collection in Brazil by nearly 200 years, initially served as the imperial palace of Brazil and was considered Latin America’s largest museum of its kind and one of the five largest in the world of natural history.