The Bendego meteorite sits defiantly on a pedestal against a backdrop of the charred remains of the National Museum of Brazil. The world’s largest meteorite first survived a fiery entry through the Earth’s atmosphere and is now one of the few remaining items standing after a blaze that gutted the Rio institution.

Losing Brazil’s national museum is on the same scale as losing the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the British Museum in London. It was the largest natural-history museum in Latin America, holding over twenty million collection items. You only had to see the footage of the inferno to understand how extensive the damage was likely to be. Fire leapt against a night sky. Flames licked out of windows and the inside of the building lit up like a Halloween pumpkin. The next morning, the burnt-out colonial façade was a blackened skeleton, smoke still rising from its bones.