Tag: museum life

Birds In Mud

(Repost) Fool Me At All, Shame On You

lisagbuckley

This is a repost from my old blog site from April 2016 when, I swear to the Great Grey Owl, a marketing company tried to recruit me for what is a plot from a Simpson’s episode…except they were dead serious.

***

April Fools’ Day is tomorrow, and I am waiting with mild trepidation over what faux science gags I am going to see on the Internet. What I was not prepared for was to have someone actively try to recruit me to deceive the public in a pretty rotten way.

Let’s be clear right from the start, Dear Reader: I love a good prank. I’ve been on the receiving end of many a gag courtesy of my colleagues. The most recent prank was having my office filled with toy spiders – we refer to it as The Spidering…this happened over a year ago, and I’m still finding spiders (NOTE: This happened 7 years ago, and I am STILL FINDING PLASTIC SPIDERS IN MY THINGS. That’s OK: I got Rich back. He will be finding cat pictures in his books FOR YEARS. ) What I REFUSE to do is to actively deceive the public with regards to fossil discoveries, fossil heritage appreciation, and fossil conservation.

Enter my phone conversation from Tuesday afternoon.

I’m out of town, picking up some supplies for the up-coming field season. My cellphone interrupts my browsing. It’s a phone number from British Columbia. NOTE: As technologically slow as I am, I am pretty good at Googling phone numbers – I know exactly which organization made this call.

I will refer to the person on the other end as Skippy. Skippy was all excited to tell me of their great idea. There is a project that is going ahead somewhere in British Columbia (not in my neck of the woods), and those involved thought that a great way to get publicity would be to announce a fake dinosaur skeleton discovery as a result of said project. This plan was considered a good idea because, well, April Fools’ Day. Skippy continued: they even wanted to get the public involved in submitting names for their new fake dinosaur find. Skippy was wondering if they could use our former institution’s name to lend their April Fools’ prank credibility.

Dear Readers, guess how I responded. I think I was quite polite under the circumstances.

The first words out of my mouth were “Absolutely not!” I went on to say a version of this:

There is already a culture of mistrust in the general public towards science and scientists. The public is also deeply interested in fossil discoveries and news, and trusts that when such news is announced, it’s for real. Faking a fossil discovery in British Columbia and using the name of an institution would only serve to fuel such public distrust of scientists. There is no way that we could in good conscience take part in such a scheme.

I ended the conversation with Skippy by saying “And I had better not see our names anywhere near anything that you publicize.” Skippy’s response was “You won’t be included,” wording that makes me think that they are actually still planning to go ahead with this Scicomm Wrong.

Half-assed publicity stunts such as these give me nothing but anger and frustration. This is nothing more than manipulating people’s natural curiosity about dinosaurs and fossils for a project that will do absolutely nothing to further their appreciation of their province’s fossil heritage. There is no way that this can be spun as a scicomm opportunity: had our name been associated with this scheme, we would have lied to the public – April Fools’ Day or no – and given them a reason to get excited about dinosaurs in British Columbia. People trust us, whether they consciously recognize that trust or no, to give them trustworthy and factual information about the fossil heritage in British Columbia.

I will not apologize for this: I respect and greatly appreciate the public’s natural interest in their fossil heritage. We will never abuse that interest for the sake of tacky publicity.

British Columbia is only just starting to develop a cultural appreciation and respect for the province’s fossil heritage, and still has work to do towards viewing fossils as irreplaceable heritage and not just a get-rich-quick means to marketing. The idea that the public has a sense of ownership and pride over their province’s heritage is not yet at the levels we see in Alberta (an even better example is South Korea), where fossils have been part of the cultural identity for decades. Science education institutions rely on the goodwill of the public to be supportive of fossil heritage protection and conservation. We will not lightly throw that hard-earned trust away for the sake of a “joke”.

Unfortunately for many of us scientists engaging in science communication about our respective fields, we are bombarded with examples of credible-looking fake-umentaries presented by organizations that are trusted by the public as providers of accurate information, all for the sake of publicity. Pick your favorite cryptozoology hunter show – my favorite examples are anything involving Bigfoot, which I have written about previously. Newsweek recently put out a special issue on Bigfoot. National Geographic has also jumped into the realm of presenting Bigfoot “research”. Discovery Channel’s Megalodon fakery. Discovery Channel’s Mermaids fakery. These are all communication brands that have the trust of the public, and that trust is manipulated each and every time a fake-umentary or sensationalized show is presented as fact.

Public Service Science Announcement (PSScA): there is indeed such as thing as bad publicity, especially when it deliberately exploits people’s science curiosity for the sake of clicks or views.

UPDATE: Indeed, Dear Readers, I did scour the Internet for a week after this phone call to ensure that a) no “dinosaur” discovery was announced and b) anyone’s name that I knew wasn’t associated with it. I saw nothing, so maybe they took the hint.

Birds In Mud

Field Work Is Hard Work

lisagbuckley

Note: I originally had these tweets curated on Storify.

One of the most high-profile parts of paleontology is the field work. I would bet my last bag of Earl Grey Special (note: must order more tea) that when one thinks of paleontology, the word conjures images of rocky badlands terrain and a small group of people wearing big hats and vests and bandannas crouched in a sun-beaten rocky quarry, dusting off bones that haven’t seen the light of day in 74 million years. It’s like a scientifically-endorsed treasure hunt, and people want to be of that story.

With the excitement that fieldwork invokes comes ill-informed opinions. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this “great idea,” the research program could operate for years off of the interest alone.

The perception of the general public on what paleontology fieldwork (or any fieldwork) is actually influenced by a lot of entertainment media, I’m afraid. You aren’t shown the ACTUAL hard work (unless it’s “heroic”) that goes into a field expedition.

Some field sites are actually amenable to paying customers who want to have an experience vacation. There are two key features of these sites: accessibility and emergency coverage (cell phone coverage, within a short driving distance of emergency medical facilities, ability to get vehicles in and out of the site reliably). When I ask the tourism/marketing people who come to me with this Great Idea (TM) whether they are going to pay to have a helicopter on standby for emergency evacuations, or if they will cover the cost of a satellite phone, I get dirty looks and hear the sound of crickets.

crickets

However, the fieldwork that my colleague and I do is NOT amenable to adventure tourism for a variety of logistical, financial, and practical reasons.

How hard? The rock at our Late Cretaceous (Turonian) site is so hard that we actually broke our traditional excavation tools trying to work it. All of the excavating at that site has to be done with pneumatic tools, which bring with them their own safety risks.

Even our “classic” sites, like the B.C. hadrosaur (a.k.a. “duck-billed dinosaur” site, although calling hadrosaurs duck-billed dinosaurs is actually inaccurate!), have their own set of not-visitor-friendly frustrations.

So why does this make our kind of paleontology a bad fit for adventure/experiential tourism?

That’s when we have a site to excavate. The bulk of our fieldwork time is spent looking for these sites (a.k.a. paleontology field surveys). Paleontology field surveys are no pleasant stroll down a groomed forest path.

I have a pair of hiking boots that I specifically use for these types of surveys. They’re called Bog Boots because of the countless beaver-dammed areas we’ve had to slop through. That smell never leaves your boots, BTW.

Oh, we also cannot control the wildlife. We cannot guarantee we will not encounter cranky wildlife. We can’t guarantee that someone will see wildlife. That’s a big difference between an adventure/experiential tourist and a fieldworker: a tourist may want to have a wildlife encounter they can photograph and tell stories about. If we encounter a bear in the field, that means we weren’t loud enough to warn the bear we were coming. [One day I’ll tell you about the person who lives in this region who complained that their visiting family didn’t see wildlife on the highway drive and that “something” should be done to guarantee highway sightings. Pro tip: you really don’t want to see moose on the highway.]

Since our field surveys are not pleasure hikes, there isn’t a lot of time for dawdling (a term used by my Granny and great-aunt Molly).

We have done hundreds of hours of field surveying that have not resulted in an excavatable fossil find. That’s pretty standard for our kind of mountainous inaccessible terrain.

We don’t get disheartened because we expect to put in this kind of effort. We are not guaranteed a “reward.” However, there is an expectation from a paying tourist that they will be rewarded for spending their money.

There are also real dangers associated with fieldwork. This is a danger that myself and my colleague knowingly and willingly accept…for ourselves. The risks and hazards of being in the wilderness without the promise of immediate assistance is difficult to explain to someone who has not experienced that level of isolation.

An example: lightning in the alpine.

This is all to say that the paleontology fieldwork that people see on TV is HEAVILY edited. It’s the “Good Parts” version of fieldwork. Like reading the “good parts” version of the Princess Bride. All of the day-to-day realities of “dinosaur hunting” are removed to make the story “exciting.”

Want to know a secret (that is totally not a secret to anyone who does fieldwork)? If you participate in a “pay-to-dig” program, all of the hard parts have been pre-edited for you. It’s a programmed experience. For example, there were summer students, graduate students, and researchers who removed the overburden (the meters of rock that cover a dinosaur skeleton) before the paying participants arrived to find the bones.

Summers of hard physical work will take a toll on your body. I am a walking accumulation of fieldwork-related injuries.

That’s without me taking unnecessary risks. I can’t do the weekend warrior nonsense because I can’t afford to. My physical health is a big part of my livelihood. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many weekend volunteers take risks because, hey, they are only out there for a few days. They get cranky when I say NO. They don’t understand that their safety in my hands. If they are injured that is on my head ethically, morally, and legally. But a paying person is going to want some “adventure.” If we don’t “provide” adventure they try to make their own by taking risks.

This brings us to an important but little-discussed part of managing a fieldwork team: Field Administration.

Think about a new person starting off in your company. While you are training, you are not 100% doing your own primary work. Part of your job becomes doing your work AND reviewing the trainee’s work to provide feedback. We have a strict policy of one volunteer per trained staff on digs. Overseeing one person means that I can catch whoopsies before they happen. Usually, the Curators end up supervising both volunteers and trainees.

And mistakes WILL happen. That’s part of learning. The most common mistakes for new volunteers/staff are digging too fast or too hard (quarry rock requires a certain level of patience and experience) and not keeping on top of self-care. This is why we screen volunteers for ATTITUDE over previous skills. Skills can be learned, but you can’t un-train a bad ‘tude in one field season. Unfortunately, if you accept paying people you cannot screen for attitude. You have to take their attitude along with their money.

Here’s a list of bad field-itudes that I’ve encountered over the years:

I’ve seen the above manifest in a few ways, including older people not respecting the expertise of younger supervisors, and gendered-biases of who is “in charge” on a field-based project.

Oh yes: sexual harassment is a pervasive problem in fieldwork.

Other Bad ‘Tude Bears issues we faced are people who refuse to partake in ANY self-care (even when reminded), people who are negligent about the safety of others, and what I call the Dashed Expectations Complaining. Yes, this is hard work. No, we can’t do something “more fun” because we only have three weeks to do this dig. Bad attitudes can be more infectious than good attitudes, and someone with a realistic outlook on fieldwork is going to feel more pressure to be hap-hap-HAPPY to counteract a Bad ‘Tude Bear. That can be emotionally draining. Whether you’re in an office or under an excavation tarp, you can’t escape office personnel issues.

Pro-tip: our best field technicians came to us 100% untrained but with a positive can-do, ready-to-learn attitude. Now they are skilled and still have a great outlook on fieldwork. I will choose attitude over skill every darn time.

When a scientist is out in the field doing fieldwork, they are there to do a very specific job in a specified timeframe. They are not there to act as a tour guide. There are also ecological and cultural aspects to the “turn every dig into a business opportunity” mentality.

A big one is regarding whose land you are operating on. If you’re in North America, you are doing your research on lands that are Indigenous lands. If you want to find out whose lands you are working on, check out this link: https://native-land.ca/ You absolutely must consult with the traditional landowners before embarking on your work. If there is the desire to open up an area for tourism reasons, I feel that decision should be made by the traditional landowners.

If you respect the work that field scientists do, you will ask for their honest opinion regarding the different levels of access they feel they can accommodate in terms of experiential tourism. This includes education-based programming: if it’s too risky to bring adults to an area, it is most certainly too dangerous for children to be present. Your local scientist likely has ideas of areas that are amenable to this kind of development, but remember: the priority for these sites is still the science, and they will not hesitate to tell you no if the sites are too sensitive for this type of activity. These sites still need to be properly surveyed to ensure there won’t be any detrimental impacts to the heritage, natural history, or cultural stewardship of the area.

A site is not important just because you think that you can make money off of it or “promote” an area, region, or town. These sites record our common heritage, the story of what the area was and how we fit into that complex story. If we make a bad call and a site is damaged, we’re never going to get another chance to correct that mistake. That chapter of the story is lost forever. Preserving that story is our foremost priority, and I choose to err on the side of what’s best for the heritage.

Birds In Mud

Selling Fossils: Heritage for the Elite

lisagbuckley

Another day, another set of dinosaur skeletons going to auction.

There are at least three skeletons of charismatic dinosaurs being offered for auction by the company Artcurial: the link to the pdf of the fancy-pants advertisement brochure is here. There are many MANY things wrong with the information in the brochure, which calls into question whether actual paleontologists were involved with this process (as the brochure claims.)

The Red Flags of the Brochure.

There are three major red flags that make me doubt the statement that a paleontologist was involved in this process. Here are the flags with a brief explanation.

  1. The sentence “Allosaurus, a carnivore of the Tyrannosaurus family.” – Hoo boy, this one is a cornucopia of wrongness. Yes, the genus Allosaurus was carnivorous. However, it is NOT in the same family group as tyrannosaurs. A paleontologist would know that the family that contains all of the species of tyrannosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex is called Tyrannosauridae. Allosaurus belongs to the family group called Allosauridae. The term “family” has an exact meaning for paleontologists, biologists, etc. A family group is a formal classification in the Taxonomy Hierarchy. Here is the very basic list of the groupings, from broad (animal) to really specific (Tyrannosaurus rex as an example of a species.)
  • Kingdom
  • Phylum
  • Class
  • Order
  • Family
  • Genus
  • Species

Each level is like an exclusive club: in order to belong to the family Tyrannosauridae, you must possess a group of features that ONLY belong to members of Team Tyrannosauridae, like having fused nasal bones. If you’re Allosaurus, you have your own features that allow you to join Team Allosauridae, like having crests on the nose bones (nasals). So Allosaurus fragilis could never be in the same family as Tyrannosaurus rex because they each have different looking bones, so they belong to their own exclusive clubs. These are long-standing biology rules. Reading the quoted sentence would may any paleontologist’s eyes bleed.

2. The sentence “These two skeletons from the Jurassic era (154 – 148 million years BC)” – In all of my years as a paleontologist, I don’t think I’ve seen geologic times described in “BC” terms. We usually say “154 – 148 million years ago/old.” Also, the Jurassic is a Period, not an Era. This is not something a paleontologist is going to go “meh, good enough” about. Just like the term Family means something very exact in naming critters, the same goes for the Geologic Time Scale. The Mesozoic Era contains the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods. There simply isn’t a Jurassic era. Not only did a paleontologist not write this brochure before its release, but I would also bet that not one paleontologist was seriously involved in proof-reading or fact-checking this brochure.

3. Inconsistent use of binomial (two-part) names of dinosaurs – There are pretty strict rules regarding how scientific names of plants and animals are written. It’s like washing your hands after using the washroom or brushing your teeth before bed: you learn these rules early through repetition and constant reminder and then they become automatic. You learn early in biology, zoology, and geology classes that binomial names follow an exact format. Let’s use Tyrannosaurus rex as an example.

Tyrannosaurus is the genus name. It is always presented in italics. It is always capitalized. A genus can contain several species, meaning that if you say something about Tyrannosaurus, you are talking about all of the species in that genus club.

rex is the species name. A species is a group that has features that you can only see in animals that belong to that group. The species name is always presented in italics. It is always in lowercase letters, and it is accompanied by the genus name. Sometimes the genus name is shortened to an abbreviation, like in T. rex.

The rather sloppy use of genus and species names in this brochure is definitely a sign that a paleontologist’s eyeballs did not glance upon that page. It’s not even a consistent misuse of the names.

The Real Issue Is One of Ethics and Underfunded Museums

However, the biggest issues regarding the sale of fossils of charismatic megafauna are those of ethics and personal responsibilities of both the sellers and the buyers.

The brochure advertises the fossils’ price range at between 500,000 – 800,000 euros…each. Now, I may only be a curator as a small research center, but I do know how to do a budget AND use a currency conversion tool.  At the time of writing this post, 800,000 euros is roughly $1.2 million dollars (CAD.)

One of the responses people like me (paleontologist on the academic end of things who thinks there is ample evidence that the commercial fossil trade as it operates now needs a large-scale revamp to address several ethical and heritage conservation concerns) hear when we say “Can we rethink this whole selling of our irreplaceable heritage?” is that, if we’re so darned worried about science losing specimens like this, our museums should simply buy the specimens. Problem solved right?

Not how this works

I don’t know if the people who say this are aware, but it actually costs real money to operate a museum. You need to pay for the utilities (heat, water, electrical, sewage, etc.) You need to pay your staff. You need to pay your contracted staff, like sanitation workers. The different departments (displays, gift shop, research, collections) need an operating budget.

Let us hypothetically explore the possibility of a small museum (it’s what I know, I can’t speak for large institutions) purchasing one of these specimens. My collections department, Population of One (that’s me) does not have $1.2 million just lying around in discretionary funds. I am also not going to justify lobbying and fundraising to purchase one specimen when there are a myriad of pressing issues that the collections face, such as upgrading the environmental monitoring, installing heavy-duty shelving, upgrading our internet services for a digital specimen server, and getting a backup generator for when (not if, when) the power goes out in the dead of winter. Want a collections headache? Think about what would happen if your pipes froze and burst. Think about where all that water runs. Now think about how most collections are in the lower levels of buildings.

Let us assume that someone knocks on my collections room door and I emerge, Morlock-like from the shadows, to find out this someone will donate $1.2 million so that we could bid on the specimen. First I would show them the Priorities List. Second, I would have to explain that they might be throwing their money away. According to the Member Bylaw on Ethics Statement of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology,

“The barter, sale or purchase of scientifically significant vertebrate fossils is not condoned, unless it brings them into, or keeps them within, a public trust. Any other trade or commerce in scientifically significant vertebrate fossils is inconsistent with the foregoing, in that it deprives both the public and professionals of important specimens, which are part of our natural heritage.”

Yes, purchase of the skeleton(s) by a museum or academic institution would bring them into the public trust. However, the value of specimens doesn’t just lay in their dry ol’ bones. The value is the information that is collected with the specimen. It takes a while for a science-based dig to dig up skeletons and bonebeds because of all of the nitpicky data that needs to be collected. Personally, I LOVE excavation quarry mapping. I love the painstaking attention that must be paid to the accurate drawing, measuring the compass direction of the bones, measuring how much they are tilted in the rock, and adding all of the rock-features that tell us about the environment that buried the bones. We don’t just map out the big showy pretty bones. We map out ALL of the bones and teeth that we uncover, including scrappy bone fragments. I love finding the invertebrate and plant fossils that are preserved with the skeleton. All of this is tells the story of the final days of the animal’s carcass, the story of its journey from dead body to fossil. This particular part of science is called taphonomy.

We have no idea if this taphonomy data will (if any were collected) come with the specimen. It is up to the collectors to determine what value they place on this data. Every time skeletons like these are collected without their associated taphonomy information, the skeletons are reduced to the status of a Thanksgiving table centerpiece: it looks pretty but doesn’t contain any meat.

Personally, I would tell the person to save their money. Or, if they really want to be associated with a spectacular find, I would try to convince them that a bigger bang for their buck is in starting legacy funds for field research programs that will discover new and exciting specimens. I say will because it will inevitably happen. The science of paleontology is still rapidly advancing, and there are still so many exciting questions that need not-yet-discovered specimens to answer. Were I to win the Lotto Max or some such lottery, I wouldn’t be buying specimens. I would be handing bags o’ money to curators and saying “You do you” and sit back and watch the magic happen. New discoveries would be made because these curators would finally have the resources to do their dream projects. I don’t know one curator/researcher who doesn’t have “If Money Were No Obstacle” project list. I would also be handing bags o’ money to collections facilities at small institutions.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology recently came out with a letter calling for the cancel of the sale of these specimens. You can see the text of the letter attached to their tweet:

The letter succinctly addresses the ethical and legal concerns regarding the sale. As I’ve mentioned before, just because you see a fossil for sale doesn’t mean it was collected or exported legally. There are many cases of false information being used on import/export forms to get fossils in and out of countries, like exporting fossils as “rock art,” for example. Don’t be accidentally duped into participating in an illegal activity.

What we see with these sales is not a love of heritage and a desire to preserve and share our planet’s heritage with the world. We see heritage being treated like a luxury item that only the privileged few can ever hope to afford. These auctions treat our common heritage like a toy to covet, not as an opportunity to learn more about our planet and how we as a species fit into this amazingly complex picture. The buying and selling of charismatic fossils such as this is the world of the elite. If the fossils are purchased by an individual or a private company, they get to decide exactly who does and doesn’t see the fossils. They control the access. Money, in this case, is most certainly power.

I don’t know if I’ll see this trend of selling heritage to the highest bidder go extinct in my lifetime. I wish the same energy and resources that are put into extracting, selling, and buying heritage would be channeled to the public institutions that are trying their darndest to preserve this heritage for future generations on a frayed shoestring of a budget. I don’t do what I do for me. I do it for the person who comes after me 100 years from now and wants to unlock answers to our planet’s mysteries by using our collections. I hope they understand that I did the best that I could with what I had to work with.

 

Birds In Mud

Funding Neglect Kills Museums: #MuseuNacional Fire Was A Preventable Tragedy

lisagbuckley

I am at a loss for words today. Late Sunday night (in my time zone) I started seeing tweets on the devastating fire at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. This is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution, founded in 1818, and is the largest scientific repository for historical, biological, geological, and palaeontological specimens in the country. The fire reportedly happened after hours, and no one was killed or injured (at least no injuries have been reported). Firefighters were reportedly dispatched at 7:30 pm. What we did see on Twitter were images of people trying to get as many specimens out of the inferno as safely possible: they are not my images to post, but I will link to the tweet where I saw them here:

The collections that were impacted by the fire were the palaeontology specimens – including South America’s oldest human fossil, Luzia, the invertebrate specimens (insects and relatives), historical royal documents, and the country’s largest Egyptology collection. The herbarium, library, and fish and reptile collections may have been spared as they are housed separately. Indigenous knowledge is likely now lost, as the collection held audio records of languages that are not now spoken.

We are unsure at this time how many of the metal cabinets were able to withstand the intense heat of a fire this size: there is a slim chance that some specimens that could not be hand-carried by soul-sick museum staff, volunteers, firefighters, and soldiers may still be intact. We will know more when they sift through the torched remains of scientific and historical memory.

How Did This Happen?

The tl;dr version is lack of secure, stable operational funding. The Deputy Director of Museu Nacional, Luis Fernando Dias Duarte, describes in an interview with media how they Museu Nacional fought to receive adequate funding for the internationally important work of this institution. From a BBC news article:

“We fought years ago, in different governments, to obtain resources to adequately preserve everything that was destroyed today.”

There is now a public outcry regarding the neglect of government bodies towards the Museu Nacional and the operational funding, but it’s too late once the specimens and the building have been lost to a preventable event. The museum staff and scientists have been trying to raise awareness of the lack of funding for the Museu Nacional for years. Also quoted from the Deputy Director in The Guardian:

“For many years we fought with different governments to get adequate resources to preserve what is now completely destroyed,” he said. “My feeling is of total dismay and immense anger.”

What amounts of money are we talking about anyway? It is a frustratingly small amount. The Museu Nacional is supposed to receive $128,000 annually for its operations, but since 2014 it has not received the full amount. National Geographic reports that in 2018 the Museu Nacional received a grand total of…wait for it…$13,000, and had to temporarily close its doors.

That is just for the operational costs. Operations refer to day-to-day activities of a museum: paying staff, heating, lights, and general maintenance and cleaning. Operational expenses do not cover the capital upgrades and renovations that a historic building (it was once the royal court in 1808) such as the Museu Nacional needs to keep staff and specimens safe. Capital projects refer to large targeted projects and major equipment. Major renovation projects that needed to be crowdfunded (that should have been paid for by the state and national government) include damage done by termites to the museum’s major dinosaur exhibit. There was a modernization plan in place that would have addressed the fire prevention system as well as other necessities, but that plan was not to take place until after October elections. The firefighters could only work with what they had available, and that was water from a nearby lake. They did all they could. Politics delayed a plan that would have prevented this tragedy.

But now it is too late. How much will it now cost to just repair the structure? How much will it cost to replace the archival equipment? We can’t ask “How much will it cost to replace the lost specimens” because WE CANNOT REPLACE THE LOST SPECIMENS. Many of those specimens include type specimens: that means they are the first and best example of an organism. They are the specimen that contains all of the information we need to study these organisms. Once you lose those, you lose the source of that knowledge. How do you replace that? How do you replace the years, decades, centuries of work that went into investigating those specimens? How do you replace the careers that are built on those specimens?

These specimens represent 200 years of Brazil’s history. Two hundred years of dedicated work by Brazil’s scientists, students, museum professionals, and volunteers. Two hundred years of accumulated knowledge that helped us better understand our place as humans in this great complex world. We can’t replace that.

A Wake-Up Call To The Funders of the World’s Museums

Brazilain President Michel Tremer has directed the museum be rebuilt using public and private funds. As Dias Duarte is quoted in The Telegraph: “Everybody wants to be supportive now. We never had adequate support.”

Where was this government-level concern when the tragedy could have been prevented by ensuring the Museu Nacional received enough funding to have their systems upgraded early on? Note: $128,000 is a paltry amount of money for a museum operating budget. A museum of this stature should have an annual operating budget of millions, not thousands, for its staff to properly care for priceless heritage.

Where was the government-level concern when the museum only received $13,000 this year and had to close its doors? That alone should have been a wake-up call for funders that the Museu Nacional was struggling, but it wasn’t enough.

Where was the government-level concern when the Museu Nacional had to crowdfund the repairs for the palaeontology exhibit?

Where was the government-level concern when, for years, the personnel of the Museu Nacional tried to secure government funds?

The main reason the government (which consistently neglected the Museu Nacional) made such a statement of rebuilding using public and private funds is that this a highly visible tragedy. A government can easily ignore a group of museum professionals and scientists when they ask for needed funds. Those asks are often done quietly, through “the proper channels,” as it were. These asks are done with the idea in mind that the scientists and museum professionals will be painted as trying to manipulate the government into giving them money if they make the ask publicly-known. Publicly revealing requests to government is framed by the recipients as blackmail and unwarranted pressure. So museums ask politely. Museums wait patiently. Museums continue to publicly thank the government for whatever inadequate funding they receive. Sometimes government officials suggest going after private donations instead of asking the government to help care for its heritage: private or industrial funding isn’t common, and it puts the responsibility on museums already stretched to their limits. Museums continue to limp along on shoestring budgets, expected to deliver programs while being simultaneously starved.

This is not the only museum, not the only home of irreplaceable and invaluable history and heritage, that has been gutted by short-sighted neglect and the consequential preventable tragedy.  The Natural History Museum in New Delhi lost its entire collection to a fire in 2016. The fire suppression system was out of order, and the museum was already known to be inadequately maintained (which requires money.) The Butantan Institute (Sao Paulo) collections, which housed snake, scorpion, and spider specimens used for vaccines and medical research, were gutted by a fire in 2010. The archive was not equipped with a fire suppression system (which requires money).

If you read the news articles regarding these great losses, you’ll see official government quotes that express sadness for the loss of irreplaceable heritage and what a loss it is to the country and the world, etcetera, etcetera. Those sentiments tend to ring hollow in the ears of those who fought for years to maintain bare minimum funding from these same governments, only to be rebuked or ignored.

Government and private funders of museums need to learn these valuable lessons from the Museu Nacional tragedy:

  1. Many museum specimens cannot be replaced once they are destroyed. If the destruction was preventable, funders bear the responsibility of that loss to the world. That is bad optics. Even if funders do not care a sniff over the heritage lost, they should care about how the public and the world perceives the inaction that leads to these tragedies.
  2. It is less expensive to properly fund a museum in the long-term than it is to repair and rebuild after a preventable tragedy. An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.
  3. A properly funded museum is a public relations asset that can either work in a government’s favor. A poorly funded museum will display the government’s inadequacies. VIPs touring the museum will look with a critical eye at the water-stained ceiling tiles, the old computers in offices, and the outdated lighting fixtures. They will see the strain in the eyes of museum personnel who have stretched themselves to the limit to keep that museum running on fumes.

I completely trust the professionals at the Museu Nacional when they say they have fought for years for adequate support. I trust them because they are the professionals at that museum, and fought for years for it to succeed in spite of (not thanks to) the funding they received. I trust the professionals at the Museu Nacional because I too am a museum professional. I have been involved with running a natural history museum on inadequate funding for fourteen years, and I am familiar with the stress and the strain, the blood, sweat, and tears one pours into a museum to keep it running. To think that museum professionals don’t know – and I mean intimately know – exactly what it takes to maintain and upgrade that institution is ridiculous. Their dedication, time, love, and devotion to caring for those now-lost specimens as best as they could was disrespected beyond measure each time they were ignored, dismissed, or delayed. Museum professionals are not trying to scam money for expensive personal vacations: they are worried sick about the specimens.

An organization, government or otherwise, cannot claim to care for or respect their heritage if they are not doing the utmost to properly care for that heritage. Doing the utmost requires providing stable, adequate, long-term operational funding. It requires acting quickly to help a museum upgrade old systems (wiring, fire suppression, etc.) It requires respecting the museum professionals enough to recognize that they are tasked with an internationally important responsibility of being stewards of irreplaceable heritage.

The Museu Nacional will continue, and hopefully now with the funding that it needed all along. We need to ensure that other museums that are currently struggling to keep the lights on and care for their heritage receive the support they deserve…before tragedy strikes.