For more than 200 years, Brazil's National Museum—or Museu Nacional—stood as the country's oldest and most important safeguard for its heritage. Now, one of Latin America's largest natural history museums is a burnt-out husk of its former self. A massive fire broke out at the museum late September 2, torching its exhibits and some 90 percent of the museum's 20 million artifacts. There were no reported fatalities.

As firefighters worked to put out the blaze, some museum staffers and volunteers pulled what they could from the building, including part of the museum's mollusk collection. The museum's Bendegó meteorite, the largest ever found in Brazil, is one of the few objects that survived direct contact with the flames. Scientists