Diego Astúa: "I guess many of you already know the devastating news by now...
The main building of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro is on fire. Most of it will be gone, roofs collapsed, all the wood structure consumed. This includes all exhibits, most of the Invertebrates collections (all of entomology), archeology, of paleontology. All gone.
Vertebrates, Botany, Library and part of the Invertebrates are in separate buildings and have not been affected. Marine invertebrates are in a separate buidling but very close. Fire has not reached it yet. Firefighters have given up trying to rescue what is inside the buiding and consider it all gone. They will try to preserve the outer structure." Diego Astúa September 2 at 9:05 PM, FB
"This photo could not be more emblematic. The Maracanã Stadium, retired recently and cost more than 1 billion reais and next to the National Museum, which received less than 400 thousand reais per year to take care of its maintenance. It shows a lot of what we are as people, as a society, as a nation". - Julio Reis
By Katy Watson, BBC South America correspondent
The pale yellow building is still standing - but the windows are burned out, the roof has gone and its insides are black.
Throughout the day, firefighters, investigators and even museum staff have been going into the building and every so often they have brought out bits of artefacts or anything they think they can salvage from the rubble.
Brazil museum fire: Funding cuts blamed as icon is gutted
Officials in Brazil have blamed lack of funding for a huge fire that has ravaged the country's National Museum.
One of the largest anthropology and natural history collections in the Americas was almost totally destroyed in Sunday's fire in Rio de Janeiro.
This included the 12,000-year-old remains of a woman known as "Luzia" - the oldest discovered in Latin America.
There had also been a string of complaints about the dilapidated state of the 200-year-old museum.
Double Blow to Brazil Museum: Neglect, Then Flames
By Manuela Andreoni, Ernesto Londoño and Lis Moriconi
Sept. 3, 2018
RIO DE JANEIRO — The stately national museum, once home to Brazil’s royal family, was still smoldering at sunrise on Monday when scores of researchers, museum workers and anthropologists began gathering outside, dressed in black.
Some sobbed as they began taking stock of the irreplaceable losses: Thousands, perhaps millions, of significant artifacts had been reduced to ashes Sunday night in a devastating fire. The hall that held a 12,000-year-old skeleton known as Luzia, the oldest human remains discovered in the Americas, was destroyed.
"We burn the fifth largest museum in the world.
We burn the 12-thousand-Year-old fossil of luzia, discovery that has remade all research on occupation of the Americas.
We burn murals from Pompeii.
We burn the sarcophagus of sha amun in su, one of the only ones in the world that has never been opened.
We burn the Bertha Lutz Botanical Collection.
We burn the biggest Brazilian dinosaur ever mounted with almost all original pieces.
We burn the limai, largest brazilian carnivore.
We burn some fossils of extinct plants.
We burn the largest meteor collection in Latin America.
We burn the throne of king adandozan of the African Kingdom of dahomey, dating from the the 3rd century.
We burn the building where Brazil's independence was signed.
We burn two libraries.
We burn the career of 90 researchers and other technicians.
What Burns in the museum is a part of humanity's anthropological history. The scientific history of humanity.
If they could, they would burn us with the walls of the museum, with the building itself, with the rooms where d. Peter ii reigned, with the corridors through which the taskmasters of the first constitution of the republic passed,
If they could, they'd burn us.
It's immeasurable what we lost.
I'm swallowing the crying.
"all who pass through here protect this slab, for it holds a document that reveals the culture of a generation and a milestone in the history of a people who knew how to build their own future". that's what was written on the ground, in front of the National Museum."