Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20m items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and was still raging during the night. There have been no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture is incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

The museum was part of Rio’s Federal University but had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Its impressive collections included items brought to Brazil by Dom Pedro I – the Portuguese prince regent who declared the then-colony’s independence from Portugal – Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts, “Luzia”, a 12,000 year-old skeleton and the oldest in the Americas, fossils, dinosaurs, and a meteorite found in 1784. Some of the archive was stored in another building but much of the collection is believed to have been destroyed.

The museum was part of Rio’s Federal University but had fallen into disrepair in recent years.

Gonna be ironic, not to mention enraging, if a fraction of the money they wasted on the Olympics and the World Cup could have been used for such mundane things as making sure the fire suppression systems in places like museums actually worked.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began.

Duart also said that the museum had just closed a deal with the Brazilian government’s development bank, BNDES, for funds that included a fire prevention project. “This is the most terrible irony,” he said.

"The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide. A crime against our past and future generations," Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil’s best-known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

Or, even had them in the first place, which this museum didn't.

This is national tragedy for Brasil and I think will end up being emblematic for the decline of Brasil in recent years; where billions could be spend on stadiums that have already fallen into disrepair and Olympic venues go unused while, so many don't have work and national treasures aren't given a second though until they go up in flames.