The political collapse of Eastern Europe has ravaged its priceless natural history collections. The European Union could rescue many of these as part of its commitment to preserve cultural heritage.

In the small, war-torn nations of the western Balkans, for example, natural history collections receive much less government funding than museums of history, ethnography and archaeology. Ministries of science in countries of the former Yugoslavia dismiss the importance of natural history collections for research infrastructure or as scientific heritage.

Unstable funding forced the Sarajevo museum to close in 2012, and many of its historical specimens — including 10,000 bird skins and 500,000 insects from the Balkans — have not been properly curated for years. And the break-up of the Soviet Union left individual states with little interest in maintaining their collections — including one of the world's most important, at the Zoological Museum in St Petersburg, Russia.

All of these once well-managed collections are now decaying, making the plight of Italy's natural history museums the tip of an iceberg (see Nature 515, 311–312; 2014).