Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo

This guide to the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo opens in 1893, when hammers nailed shut crates in a downtown house, splitting one merchant's strange collection into two separate afterlives. Joaquim Sertório had spent decades filling his home with stuffed jaguars, taxidermied toucans, and idols and relics gathered from across South America, never separating the sacred from the scientific. A wealthy backer bought the whole hoard for the state, and it became the seed of the great Museu Paulista, before officials pulled bones, feathers and fish scales out to form a department of their own. Look up at the ceramic toucans on the facade before you go in.