Support for the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina stands in solidarity and sympathy with the colleagues of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

On Sunday evening, a major fire captured the 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, one of the oldest in Brazil. Since 1818, this museum has been holding a collection of Greek-Roman artefacts, a paleontological collection featuring a dinosaur skeleton found in the Minas Gerais region, the Egyptian mummy Sha-Amun-In-Su dated to year 750 BC as well as the oldest human fossil found in Brazil. The museum collection featured over 20 million valuable items. Risking their own lives, employees have managed to save the fossilized remains of about 40,000 prehistoric molluscs. The audio recordings of indigenous, today's extinct, languages were also lost in the fire. It is assumed that libraries, herbarium and biological department with fish and reptiles were preserved.

It is known that the National Museum has been neglected by the Brazilian government for years, and that the fire was due to obsolete installations and fire protection systems.