Thieves broke into Paris’s Natural History Museum and stole gold samples worth €600,000 (£515,000), the institution confirmed, marking the latest in a series of robberies from cultural sites.
Renowned for its dinosaur skeletons and taxidermy, the museum in the capital’s 5th district also houses a geology and mineralogy gallery. Staff discovered the break-in on Tuesday morning. The intruders reportedly used an angle grinder and blow torch to force their way inside the riverside complex, which attracts both Parisians and tourists.
“The theft concerns several specimens of native gold from the national collections,” the museum’s press office told AFP. “While the stolen specimens are valued at around €600,000 at raw gold prices, they carry immeasurable heritage value.”
Native gold is a natural alloy of gold and silver.
According to Le Parisien, the museum’s alarm and surveillance systems were disabled in a July cyberattack, though it remains unclear whether they were functioning during the theft.
Museum director Emmanuel Skoulios told BFM TV: “We are dealing with an extremely professional team, perfectly aware of where to go and equipped with specialist tools. It is absolutely not by chance they targeted these specific items.”
The mineralogy gallery closed on Tuesday as staff checked for further losses. Among its prized pieces is a native gold and quartz sample from the Donatia mine in California, donated by a French collector.
The robbery “comes at a critical time for cultural institutions,” the museum said, noting that several public collections had been targeted recently.
Earlier this month, thieves raided the Adrien Dubouché National Museum in Limoges, stealing Chinese porcelain treasures valued at €6.5 million. Last November, armed men plundered the Cognacq-Jay museum in Paris, and the following day jewellery worth millions was stolen from a museum in Saône-et-Loire.
The most infamous heist occurred in May 2010 at Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne, when burglar Vjeran Tomic, nicknamed “Spiderman”, stole paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Léger and Modigliani worth over €100 million. Security failings later emerged, including broken alarms and inattentive guards. Tomic received an eight-year prison sentence in 2017.