Brazil museum fire: Funding sought to rebuild collection.

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▼ Brazilian President Michel Temer says the government is seeking funding from companies and banks to help rebuild the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro after it was destroyed by fire.
Education Minister Rossieli Soares said international help was also being sought and talks with the UN's cultural body, Unesco, were under way.
Museum officials say almost 90% of the collection has been destroyed.
Staff have blamed the fire on years of funding cuts.
The museum housed one of the largest anthropology and natural history collections in the Americas. It included the 12,000-year-old remains of a woman known as "Luzia".
On Monday, President Temer's office said he had held talks with officials from major Brazilian banks and businesses to examine ways to reconstruct the museum "as soon as possible".
Addressing reporters outside the ruined building, Mr Soares said the federal government had set aside an initial 15m reais (£2.8m; $3.6m) to rebuild the structure and restore its collection.
How did the fire start?
An investigation has been launched but Culture Minister Sergio Leitao told the Estado de S.Paulo newspaper that the most likely causes were an electrical fault or a homemade paper hot-air balloon landing on the roof.
The fire started on Sunday evening, after the building - a 19th Century former royal palace - closed for the day.
It is not yet clear if the museum was insured.
The city's fire chief, Roberto Robadey, said nearby hydrants were dry when emergency services arrived. He said crews had to get water from a nearby lake and from tanker trucks.
"Yesterday was one of the saddest days of my career," he said.
On Monday, fire crews were sifting through the charred wreckage, occasionally emerging with an artefact or a painting they had managed to rescue.
What has the reaction been?
Riot police fired tear gas outside the park housing the museum on Monday as a small, irate crowd tried to enter.
Many demonstrators were angry at the budget cuts that they say led to the fire.
The protesters were later allowed to surround the museum's perimeter in a symbolic "embrace."
Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte, a deputy director at the museum, expressed "immense anger", and accused Brazilian authorities of a "lack of attention".
"We fought years ago, in different governments, to obtain resources to adequately preserve everything that was destroyed today," he said.
One issue appears to be the lack of a sprinkler system.
Mr Dias Duarte told Globo TV that a $5.3m (£4.1m) modernisation plan agreed in June would have included modern fire prevention equipment, but only after October's elections.
Roberto Leher, rector of the Rio de Janeiro federal university which administers the museum, said the community was "very mobilised, and very indignant".
"We all knew the building was vulnerable," he said.
What did the museum contain?
The flames tore through hundreds of rooms containing some 20 million artefacts. They ranged from fossils and the reconstructed skeleton of a dinosaur to Roman frescoes and pre-Columbian Brazilian objects.
The jewel in the crown for many visitors was "Luzia" - the oldest human remains ever discovered in Latin America.
"Luzia is a priceless loss for everyone interested in civilisation," museum director Paulo Knauss told AFP news agency.
Using her skull, experts had produced a digital image of her face, which was used as the basis for a sculpture that was also gutted by the fire.
Another popular exhibit was the Bendegó meteorite, weighing more than five tonnes and discovered in Minas Gerais region in the 18th Century.
Deputy director Cristiana Serejo said it had survived along with part of the zoological collection, the library and some ceramics.

• Brazil National Museum fire: Key treasures at risk

The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is a treasure trove which contains more than 20 million scientific and historical items.
A massive fire spread through the 200-year-old institution on Sunday engulfing almost all of its rooms and gutting large parts of the building.
Most of its priceless collection is thought to have been burnt. BBC News takes a look at some of the museum's most treasured items. It is not yet clear if they are among those destroyed.
1. Luzia
The museum was home to Luzia, the nickname given to what are thought to be the oldest human remains found in the Americas.
The remains were found in a cave in 1975 in in the state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio, by French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire.
Tests suggest the skull and bones belonged to a woman in her 20s who was just under five feet tall (1.5m). They are estimated to be 11,500 years old.
2. Bendegó
The largest iron meteorite to be found in Brazil. Weighing 5,260kg (11,600lb) it was found by a boy looking for a lost cow in the state of Bahía in north-east Brazil in 1784.
Transporting the meteorite turned out to be a major endeavour. An attempt to move it in 1785 by a cart pulled by 20 pairs of oxen ended in disaster when the cart ran out of control down a hill and landed in the bed of a stream.
The meteorite was not recovered until more than a century later when a retired Brazilian naval officer was put in charge of getting it to Rio.
It finally arrived in the National Museum in 1888 after a long journey by specially built cart, rail and ship.
Partly due to its size and partly to its laborious transportation to Rio, the meteorite became famous beyond Brazil and in 1889 a wood reproduction was exhibited at the Universal Exposition in Paris.
3. Maxakalisaurus
The reconstructed skeleton of a Maxakalisaurus was the biggest dinosaur on display at the National Museum in Rio.
Parts of the skeleton of a Maxakalisaurus were found in Minas Gerais in 1998.
The plant-eating giant lived 80 million years ago in the area now occupied by Brazil. A million people came to see the display, according to museum figures.
The room housing the 13m-long (44ft) skeleton had just re-opened in July after termites ate through the base on which the Maxakalisaurus stood.
The museum had resorted to crowd-funding to repair the damage.
4. Pompeii fresco
A Roman fresco from the ancient city of Pompeii was one of the star exhibits of the museum's Greco-Roman collection.
The fresco had survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79AD.
5. Pre-Columbian artefacts
The archaeological section of the museum held more than 100,000 objects with a priceless collection of Brazilian artefacts dating back to pre-Columbian times.
Funerary urns, Andean mummies, textiles and ceramics from across Latin America were also gathered throughout the 19th Century to be studied and displayed in the museum.
Some of the items on display came from the personal collection of Emperor Pedro II of Brazil.
6. The building itself
The museum is housed in a former palace which during colonial times was the official residence of the Portuguese royal family.
The building in its current form dates back to the early 19th Century when a rich merchant donated it to the Portuguese royal family, which extended the manor house and turned it into the neoclassical São Cristóvão palace.
After Brazil became independent from Portugal, the palace became the residence of Brazil's Emperor Pedro I.
Pedro I's son, Pedro II, was born in the palace in 1825 and grew up there. The imperial family left the country after Brazil became a republic in 1889.
In 1892, the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, itself founded in 1818, moved into the palace.
Millions of people have since visited its vast exhibits on anthropology, archaeology and natural history.

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