Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, could make its way to Denver on its first-ever U.S. tour.
The fossil, an archaeological celebrity, will spend six years on its American tour and could visit Denver, Chicago, Washington and New York, according to an Associated Press story.
Officials at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Lucy’s likely Denver stop, said they had not heard about the tour on Tuesday but welcomed the news.
“It’s a hugely significant specimen,” said Laura Holtman, manager of public relations. “It’s one of those fossils that resonates with people. Everyone’s very intrigued by the origins of Homo sapiens. It would be like a fossilized version of ‘Body Worlds.”‘
The Houston Museum of Natural Science spent four years brokering the historic tour. Officials there did not return calls Tuesday. Details of the tour are still being finalized, according to the AP story.
It’s possible that the idea of taking the tour to Denver was floated by the Houston museum as a selling point for the Ethiopian government, which has only displayed Lucy in public twice.
A replica of Lucy sits in the Natural History Museum in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, while the actual fossil is stored in a vault.
The Houston museum “may have said, ‘Hey, we’ve seen a lot of interest from U.S. museums,”‘ Holtman said. “That seems to me like the likely case.”
The tour, which begins in September, is important for several reasons.
First, it will infuse much-needed cash into Ethiopia’s museums. Ethiopia’s Tourism and Culture Minister Muhammed Dirir told AP that money from the deal will be used for new museums and to upgrade existing facilities in the country, where cultural funding is scant.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though it’s likely the exhibit, which includes 190 other artifacts and relics, will travel under heavy security and insurance.
The fossil takes its name from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the Beatles song that was playing in an archaeological camp the night of its discovery. It is a partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species. U.S. paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray found the remains in the remote area of Afar in northeastern Ethiopia.
The creature is the earliest known hominid and a member of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 3 million and 4 million years ago.
Payson Sheets, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the exhibit’s Denver appearance would be “spectacular.”
“Lucy is an almost complete specimen of one of our very early ancestors,” he said. “I would be first in line to see it. It’s so much more than a skeleton. It’s a real coup for (the museum) if it works out.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
