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, one of the most recognizable in the world, will spend six years on its American tour in cities like Denver, Chicago, Washington and New York, according to an Associated Press story.
Laura Holtman at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science would not confirm plans to house the exhibit. Officials at the Museum of Natural Science in Houston, which spent four years brokering the historic tour, also did not return calls. Details of the tour are still being finalized, according to the AP story.
The tour, which begins in September, is important for several reasons. It will infuse much-needed cash into Ethiopia’s Natural History Museum in the capital city of Addis Ababa. The museum currently only displays a replica of the Lucy skeleton. The actual fossil is stored in a vault and has only been publicly displayed twice in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s Tourism and Culture Minister Muhammed Dirir told AP that money from the deal will be used to build new museums and upgrade existing ones in Ethiopia, 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, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia.
The creature is the earliest known hominid and a member of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. The consensus among scientists is that afarensis walked upright on two feet, although they disagree about whether it had ape-like agility in the trees. Losing that ability would indicate a move toward a more recognizably human existence.
