A 19th-century naturalist book missing for 16 years, ever since it was stolen from a museum in northern Brazil, has been found in London and was repatriated on 1 May.
The 1823 tome, Simiarum et vespertilionum brasiliensium species novae (New Species of Brazilian Monkeys and Bats) by the German zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix, had been taken from the Emílio Goeldi Museum in Belém in 2008. Three museum employees were charged with embezzlement in 2011 as a result of an ongoing international investigation.
The Emílio Goeldi Museum, founded in 1866 and named after the Swiss naturalist who would later serve as its director, is both a natural-history museum and research centre focussing on the Brazilian Amazon. Other books stolen from the museum have also been recovered in the past few months. These include the 1835 Reise in Chile, Peru und auf dem Amazonenstrome (A Journey in Chile, Peru and on the Amazon River) by the German botanist Eduard Friedrich Poeppig, discovered in Argentina in December; and the 1658 De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica (On the Natural and Medical History of the Indies) by the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso, found in London in March.
A spokesperson for Brazil’s Federal Police said in a statement: “The repatriation of these works is a milestone for Brazil, as it demonstrates a renewed commitment to the preservation of cultural heritage and sets an essential precedent for the recovery of historical monuments.”
In 1817, together with fellow German botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Spix travelled from Rio de Janeiro to the Colombian border on a three-year, 10,000km mission to catalogue Amazonian wildlife and Indigenous languages. When the pair returned to Germany in 1820, they brought with them thousands of plants and animals that would make up the bulk of the collection of the new Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. (They also brought back two Indigenous children, both of whom died within two years of reaching Europe.)
Spix’s 1823 book is one of several published on the trip’s findings. A number of reptiles, birds and bats are named after Spix—perhaps most notably, the bright-blue Spix’s macaw, a species that was extinct in the wild until a laborious reintroduction programme brought it back to the Amazon in 2022.
