WHEN Mario Moscatelli was growing up in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, his father often took him to the National Museum, which is held in a spectacular palace built by the Portuguese. The boy would ogle the mummies and the reptiles. He became a biologist, married an entomologist and introduced his daughters to the collection. This eventually grew to 20m items, including a large dinosaur skeleton, Greek and Roman antiquities procured by adventurous emperors, thousands of pre-Colombian artefacts, rare books and the 11,500-year-old remains of a woman known as Luzia, possibly the oldest human fossil found in the Americas.
On the evening of September 2nd, Luzia appears to have died a second death in a fire that destroyed the palace and much of its collection. The causes are still unknown, but what has enraged Brazilians is that the fire could have been avoided. In 2004 inspectors warned that exposed wires and poor safety standards...
from The Economist: Books and arts https://ift.tt/2Nn0Gjz
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