On Sunday, one of the largest anthropology and natural history collections in the Americas was almost totally destroyed in a fire in Rio de Janeiro. There had been complaints about the dilapidated state of the 200-year-oof museum and experts had warned about a serious fire risk to the building for years, but it was generally ignored by the Federal University of Rio de Janiero and the federal government due to budget cuts. The museum was home to 20 million artifacts including fossils and dinosaur bones, “Luzia” the 12,000 year old remains of a woman (the oldest discovered in Latin America), and the Bendegó meteorite.
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As a lover of dinosaur bones, this is pretty heartbreaking. This fire really shows just how disruptive and destructive budget cuts can be, especially in a building as historical and important as this. Hopefully proper care and funding will be given to museums world wide moving forward to prevent an accident like this from happening again.
ReplyDeleteIt’s important that we protect our history, and this really shows how clouded our vision has become with moetaary gain. The fact that we would have sacrificed history for budget cuts is truly disgusting.
ReplyDelete-Violet Wiedemer
That’s terrible that we lost priceless history because of “budget cuts”. This is invaluable information that teaches us how this world flourished and we need to take proper care of it. Hopefully this will be a valuable lesson and never happen again.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both you and Violet. History should be valued and not thrown away due to a lack of money and oother financial resources. Like we discussed in class, history has lessons that it can teach us; we cannot forget history. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes, and never let a situation like this happen again.
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