- For all other uses of the word Lucy, see Lucy (disambiguation).
Lucy is a 3.18 million year old female hominid, of the genus Australopithecus, whose skeleton was discovered on November 30, 1974 by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. They named it "Lucy" in reference to the famous Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played as they celebrated the find. Donald Johanson brought the skeleton (an uprecedented 40% complete) back to Cleveland, under agreement with the government of the time in Ethiopia, and returned it according to agreement some 9 years later.
Lucy was the first fossil hominid to really capture public notice, becoming almost a household name at the time.
Current opinion is that the Lucy skeleton should be classified in the species Australopithecus afarensis.
Lucy is preserved at the national Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A plaster replica is displayed instead of the original skeleton.
One of the most striking characteristics possessed by Lucy was that she had a small skull, bipedal knee structure, and molars and front teeth of human (rather than great ape) style and relative size, but a small skull and small body. The image of a bipedal hominid with small skull, but teeth like a human, was somewhat shocking to the paleoanthropological world of the time.
Further finds at Afar, including the many hominid bones in "site 333", produced more bones of concurrent date, and led to Johanson and White's eventual argument that the Koobi Fora hominids were concurrent with the Afar hominids.
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