ABOVE: The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History was one of many resources that became inaccessible to researchers during the shutdown.
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For Voltaire Neto, a paleontology PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a mid-January visit to the Smithsonian Institution was supposed to be a highlight of an extended trip to the US. He’d received funding from the Brazilian government to study fossil collections there and at other sites such as the Petrified Forest National Park (PEFO) in Arizona.
“I work with aetosaurs, an extinct group of crocodile relatives that lived in the Triassic,” Neto, currently in Raleigh, North Carolina, explains in an email to The Scientist. “Both collections are crucial to fulfill my research as they house important materials that I need to compare.”
But when the US federal government partially shut down last December, so did its scientific ...
