In 1784, a Brazilian boy who was looking for a lost cow found a gigantic meteorite instead. The 11,600-pound rock was so cumbersome to transport that it took people almost a century to get it to the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, where it has since been on proud display. And having once survived the heat of falling through the atmosphere, the Bendegó meteorite also seems to have survived the fire that tore through the museum on Sunday evening, destroying an as-yet-unquantified proportion of its 20 million specimens.
Looking at pictures of the meteorite, as it stands intact on its pedestal amid the surrounding wreckage, I’m reminded of the final lines of Ozymandias: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Just as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem was about the consequences of hubris, the museum’s ruins could be seen as a testament to neglect. The burned building was the largest natural-history museum in Latin America, but it had never been completely renovated in its 200-year history. It had long suffered from obvious infrastructure problems including leaks, termite infestations, and—crucially—no working sprinkler system. Recognizing these problems in the 1990s, museum staff began planning to move the collection to a different site, but without stable funding, those plans proceeded in fits and starts.
