A missing 19th-century book, containing information that describes different species of monkeys and bats endemic to the Amazon, has been tracked down in London 16 years after it was first stolen from a museum in Northern Brazil. It was repatriated on May 1.
About the Books Stolen from the Brazillian Museum
Dated 1823, the tome is entitled "Simiarum et Vespertilionum Brasiliensium Species Novae" ("New Species of Brazilian Monkeys and Bats") and was penned by German zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix.
It was looted from the Emilio Goeldi Museum in the Brazillian city of Belém in 2008, with three employees eventually getting charged with embezzlement in 2011 following revelations from an ongoing international investigation.
The Belém institution, which was named after the Swiss naturalist who would later be elected as its director and founded in 1866, is a two-fold establishment dealing with both natural history and Brazilian Amazon-focused research.
Alongside the 1823 tome, other books were also stolen from the museum, which were recovered months ahead of the Spix text's rediscovery.
One of these books includes 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, found in Argentina last December.
The other is the 1658 "De Indiae Utriusque re Naturali et Medica" (|On the Natural and Medical History of the Indies") by the Dutch naturalist Willem Piso, which was similarly discovered in London in March.
"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," said the country's Federal Police spokesperson in a statement quoted by Agência Brasil.
