A curator is always worried whenever an object or a part of 'his/hers' collection is due for transportation or lending to other institutions. Strict rules have to be observed and the risks are always high.
Natural History specimens are especially prone to travelling between places. Either because they were 'collected' somewhere else, or because they are exchanged between museums as a specific trade that goes on between Natural History institutions - or when they are being "robbed" from their natural institution and taken for other museums, as happened in Portugal during the French invasion around 1808, but that's another narrative still to be explored.
A different occasion for moving collections around is when you have to change the physical building where they are being kept (even if not open to the public). This happened two times with the main nucleus of the Natural History collections in Lisbon:
In Lisbon the collections were once in the Palace in Ajuda (where they were seen and “requested” by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire – Muséum Paris), at the Academy of Sciences (where they opened to the public as Museu Nacional), and at the Polytechnic School where they were moved to serve the purpose of scientific education.
Studying those displacements promises to be very useful for the biography of these collections as these were primary moments for assessment of the existing catalogues.
I for one would really like to know how was a huge block of copper (presumably weighing more than two thousand pounds) transported from Brazil into Ajuda, and then to the Polytechnic School where it stands today. I don't have images of that, but I just found this one at the online photo archive of Lisboa.
Transporting a Dragon Tree (Dracaena drago) to the Botanical Garden of Ajuda.
Dated 1911 by Benoliel, Joshua, 1873-1932
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