Lucy quickly became a celebrity of the fossil record. The search for human ancestors . As a kid growing up in Connecticut, ...

Donald Johanson excavating a fossil in 1975. (Image credit: David Brill) Finding Lucy. The modern story of Lucy began on Nov. 24, 1974, in Hadar, Ethiopia.

The fossil "Lucy" is unveiled in Ethiopia at Addis Ababa's National Museum on May 7, 2013. Jenny Vaughan / AFP via Getty Images. If we were to meet them in life, A. afarensis ...

Lucy the fossil has another nickname. In Ethiopia she is known as Dinkinesh, which means “you are marvelous” in one of the country’s official languages, Amharic.

Lucy’s discovery transformed our understanding of human origins. Don Johanson, who unearthed the Australopithecus afarensis remains in 1974, recalls the moment he found the iconic fossil.

The Lucy fossil preserved skull fragments and a lower jaw with teeth, as well as parts of the arm, leg, pelvis, spine and ribs—47 bones in all representing a whopping 40 percent of the skeleton ...

Lucy quickly became a celebrity of the fossil record. A reconstructed skeleton of Lucy is displayed next to Grace Latimer, 4, to illustrate Lucy's small stature and brain size.

In his view, traits of that fossil indicate that one branch of Lucy’s species evolved into the first members of the genus Homo, and eventually gave rise to H. sapiens (SN: 3/4/15).

Lucy quickly became a celebrity of the fossil record. The search for human ancestors. As a kid growing up in Connecticut, Johanson got a book from a neighbor that planted an electrifying idea: ...

Lucy's skeleton, along with subsequent discoveries of other fossils of her species, have given anthropologists a wealth of information about what is essentially the halfway point in human evolution.