Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi
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Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi is a Brazilian research institution and museum located in the city of Belém, state of Pará. It was founded in 1866 as the Pará Museum of Natural History and Ethnography, and later named in honour of Swiss naturalist Émil August Goeldi, who reorganized the former institution and was its director from 1894 to 1905.
The institution has the mission of researching, cataloguing and analyzing the biological and sociocultural diversity of the Amazon Basin, contributing to its cultural memory and its regional development. It has also the aim of increasing public awareness of science on the Amazon by means of its museums, botanical garden, zoological park, etc.
The Museum maintains also a scientific research station in the high Amazon forest (Estação Científica Ferreira Penna), which was inaugurated in 1993, with 330 km² in the National Park of Caxiuanã, county of Melgaço, Pará.
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[edit] Botany
The Museum staff in botany works in taxonomy and systematics of the Amazon flora, ethnobotany and economical botany, plant biodiversity, structure and dynamics of rain forests. A botanical garden and several botanical collections are maintained, since the first one, established in 1895 by Jacques Huber, and it has more than 150,000 specimens of seeds, fruits, woods, polen, histological sections and exsicata (dried and pressed specimens).
[edit] Zoology
In zoology, the Museum does research on the Amazon fauna, its geographical distribution, behavior, ecology, taxonomy and systematics in mammalogy, ornithology, herpetology, ichthyology and entomology. The zoological collections include around 150,000 specimens of vertebrate whole bodies preserved in alcohol and taxidermy, skeletons, skins, eggs, anatomical parts, etc; as well as more than 1 million specimens of invertebrates, including Arthropoda, Insecta and Mollusca.
[edit] Earth sciences
In this área, there are research groups on the evolution of Amazon ecosystems, paleontology and paleoecology of tropical regions, sedimentology, mineralogy and stratigraphy, geology, geochemistry, paleogeology and pedology (the study of soils). The paleontological collections harbored by the Museum have more than 6,000 species, and the mineralogical collections more than 1,000 samples.
[edit] Human sciences
The existence of a rich pre-history and contemporaneous history of human populations in the Amazon have motivated, since the beginning of the Museum, a host of studies in archeology, anthropology, linguistics and ethnography. The institution is probably the largest repository of such Amazonic collections in the world, with more than 81,000 pieces in the archeological collection, including lithic and ceramic artifacts, and more than 14,000 pieces in the ethnographic collection, including indigenous cultures from Brazil, Africa, Peru and Suriname. The linguistics sector studies many aboriginal languages.
