Following on the heels of Paolo’s post last week on Collections at Risk, the International Business Times reports on a collection in Iraq that is actively being destroyed. Among the irreplaceable artefacts lost was the 7th Century Assyrian winged bull – whose twin and now only survivor resides at the British Museum, London. I don’t think we can take any comfort from the fact that it’s not a Natural History collection, or assume that Natural History collections are necessarily safe from these people: they have already condemned and murdered pigeon fanciers and banned the teaching of evolution (no surprises there). For the time being we must conclude that no collection, or indeed curator, is safe – but that has probably been true for other reasons for time immemorial.