Brazil's museum fire is a global tragedy
① There have been no injuries reported after an enormous fire gutted Rio de Janeiro's National Museum on Sunday, but the toll was still immense.
② Officials suggested as much as 90 percent of the museum's collection — encompassing about 20 million objects — was destroyed by the blaze.
③ Some of the museum's treasures may have survived, including the remains of Luzia, an 11,500-year-old fossil believed to be the oldest human skeleton unearthed in the Americas.
④ But the fire probably consumed countless other pieces of Brazil's patrimony: dinosaur bones, ancient mummies, recordings of extinct indigenous languages, and myriad artifacts.
⑤ For some, it meant the disintegration of a career. For others, it means an immeasurable blow to Brazil's cultural memory.
⑥ The National Museum, the largest of its kind in Latin America, is an artifact of history itself. It was once home to the Portuguese royal family and a short-lived Brazilian imperial dynasty.
⑦ It's still unclear what caused the fire. Tragically, the preponderance of rare books and documents in the museum's archives may have fed the blaze.
