Fourth era (1939-1984)
On Saturday March 18th, 1939, the Museum received the notification of the destitution of the provisional director Antonio de Zulueta, that with a few employees that had managed and defended the institution during the war period. In his place nominated, also as a provisional director, to the paleontologist and researcher of the Museum, Eduardo Hernández-Pacheco. It nomination lasted one month, from April to May of 1939, when he was replaced by Filiberto Díaz Tosaos, in charge of the internal regime and staff purges. Later, it was the engineer Pedro de Novo y Fernández, who held the post of director for two and a half years, until October 1941.
The Museum opened it's doors the Tuesday, October 17th, six months later the end of the Civil War. The visitors came back in autumn, 1939, specially the Sundays, and they were count by thousands. Their collections had not been damaged.
Two new rooms were opened: the Ornithology room, with forty biological groups of birds in taxonomic order, and the Physical Geography room, with graphics, updated maps, photographs, engravings and models. Both were officially opened in July 1944. The Mineralogy Room focused the collection on Spanish deposits, useful minerals and ornamental stones. The Sea Room renewed its specimens, improved the lighting and was decorated with watercolours of fish.
At the administrative level, the Museum became part, as another institute, of a scientific institution recently created by Franco's government, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), founded in November 1939. The CSIC created the José Acosta Institute of Natural Sciences and the Museum was attached to it. This Institute would take on all aspects of research management, while the Museum would be responsible for the conservation of its scientific heritage and its dissemination through exhibitions. The posts of director and secretary of the José Acosta Institute would be held by the same people who carried out these same responsibilities in the Museum, and the Institute's headquarters would be that of the Museum itself.
In the 1940s the Museum, directed by Emilio Fernández Galiano from 1941 to 1953, was characterised by a process of internal fragmentation: some of its sections became autonomous centres, following a model of specialisation, contrary to the global conception of Natural Sciences that had prevailed in the institution up to that time. In March 1941, the Entomology Section was separated from the Museum and the Spanish Entomology Institute was founded with it. Its fundamental mission was to collect and study the Spanish insect fauna, and to collaborate in the control of agricultural and forest pests. A new journal, Graellsia Revista de entomólogos españoles, was published.
Two years later, in 1943, another section of the Museum, Geology and Palaeontology, became the Lucas Mallada Geological Research Centre, later an independent Institute. It consisted of four areas: petrography, palaeontology, geomorphology and physiology. Finally, in 1946, the Zoological Research Centre was established to study anatomy, animal physiology, genetics and histology. All three were located in the Palace of Industry and the Arts, which led to problems of space, resources, personnel and coordination between the parties.
The Museum staff continued to review and conserve its collections and to improve the layout of its rooms and the building in general. One of the pieces recovered for exhibition was the Megatherium americanum. This valuable specimen had been dismantled when the Museum left its first headquarters in Alcalá Street and stored in cupboards. It was restored and mounted by the geologist Carlos Vidal Box. Its presentation to the public in 1951 took place in the same room as the diplodocus. It was placed perpendicular to the dinosaur. Years later, it was placed parallel to it to make room for the skeleton of the Elephas antiquus discovered in 1958 during construction work in Villaverde Bajo (Madrid).
After the death of Emilio Fernández Galiano, Maximino San Miguel de la Cámara was appointed director of the Museum and ran it from 1953 to 1961. An unsuccessful attempt was made to bring the Museum under the direct control of the Ministry of National Education, with the idea of attracting more funding from the State and a new, more spacious and appropriate headquarters. At the time, the Museum was visited by 125.000 people a year. The initiative did not succeed and the Museum remained attached to the CSIC.
In 1955 it was agreed with Madrid City Council that the Museum would receive dead animals from the Casa de Fieras del Parque del Retiro. With this measure, the Museum increased the inflow of new funds in this period of scarce resources.
With no budget for sampling or expeditions, and hardly any activity, the Museum hardly increased its collections or the bibliographic holdings of its library. There were exceptions, such as the discovery in 1956 of the remains of three dinosaur species found in Lérida by the palaeontologist Emiliano Aguirre and the French researcher Albert-Félix de Lapparent. The ichthyology section was also promoted thanks to Luis Lozano Rey. His work was of great importance both in terms of publications and the increase in the fish collection thanks to his sampling campaigns. Ornithology also made progress with the creation of a Bird Migration Centre in 1960, on the initiative of Francisco Bernis Madrazo, head of the Museum's Vertebrate Section, with the sponsorship of the Juan March Foundation and the collaboration of volunteers.
In the 1960s there was a change of leadership. The death of San Miguel de la Cámara in 1961 gave way to the mandate of Francisco Hernández-Pacheco de la Cuesta. The new director asked the Director General of University Education to move the Museum to a newly constructed building in the Ciudad Universitaria. This attempt was unsuccessful.
At the Museum, the number of staff was becoming smaller and smaller. There was a clear decrease in the number of university lecturers. This decrease was a consequence of a regulation of the Ministry of Education in 1959 which determined the complete dedication of its teaching staff to university tasks. Research suffered and museum activity (classifying, sorting, conserving and displaying) had to continue with the Museum's limited staff. In the Taxidermy Laboratory, pieces were restored and new ones prepared, the cartographic collection was reorganised, all the pieces exhibited in the palaeontology rooms were revised, in malacology a catalogue with 30,000 entries was drawn up, the Historical Archive catalogued 2.000 documents from the years 1612 to 1786 and the Library moved its collection to new premises set up for this purpose in the Museum building.
Francisco Hernández-Pacheco retired, but remained as acting director from 1972. In October 1973 the Crown Prince Akihito of Japan visited the Museum. The prince was a great enthusiast of natural sciences, especially ichthyology. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had given notice the day before and there was not enough time to prepare the visit properly, because despite the efforts made in the previous decade to improve the museum, there was still a lot of untidy and poorly preserved collections. The press subsequently reported on the precarious situation the museum was going through.
In the mid-seventies, in March 1975, the geneticist Eugenio Ortiz de Vega was appointed director of the Museum. Shortly after taking up his post, there was another attempt to change the Museum's headquarters. The idea was to demolish the Palace occupied by the Museum and the School of Industrial Engineers and build a building for the Presidency of the Government in its place. The idea of demolition was discarded due to the architectural value of the building and its tenants (the Museum and the School) remained, and still remain, on the same site.
Eugenio Ortiz opted to try to make the Museum more functional: new uniforms for the guards; more display cases, cupboards and tables to store the exhibits; all the inventoried funds (collections, scientific apparatus and furniture), the inauguration of a reading room in the library and the reopening of the Events Room. All of this was carried out with a small staff. In 1976 there was only the director, a woman in charge of the historical archives, five assistants, an administrative assistant, six cleaning staff and five day labourers. There were no researchers, curators, curatorial staff or exhibition specialists. The first researcher's post arrived at the Museum in 1978 and the first curator of collections in 1984.
In 1979, the director of the Museum told the press of a project to renovate the Museum, which would increase the space available for visitors fivefold and increase the number of researchers and management staff. This would change the image of the Museum, the second most visited museum in Madrid, by 280.000 people a year at that time, two thirds of whom were schoolchildren. The announcement of this remodelling was intended to solve the Museum's problems and at the same time to silence the criticisms of deterioration and despoilment published in the press at the time. The total remodelling announced was to be carried out years later in the early 1990s.
An air of renovation and restructuring swept through the CSIC. At the end of 1984, the institutes that had become independent in the 1940s, the Spanish Institute of Entomology and the Institute of Geology, were reintegrated into the Museum. A new interim director, Emiliano Aguirre Enríquez, a renowned palaeontologist, was in charge of inaugurating what was to be a new and exciting stage for the National Museum of Natural Sciences.
Text by Carolina Martín Albaladejo and Ana García Herranz