Lucy fossil to make rounds in U.S.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – One of the world’s most famous fossils – the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974 – will go on display abroad for the first time in the United States, officials said Tuesday.

Even the Ethiopian public has seen Lucy only twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the capital, Addis Ababa, is a replica. The real remains are usually locked in a vault. A team from the Museum of Natural Science in Houston spent four years negotiating the U.S. tour, which will start in Houston next September.

The six-year tour will also go to Washington, D.C., New York, Denver and Chicago. Officials said six other U.S. cities may be on the tour.

Traveling with Lucy will be 190 other fossils, artifacts and relics.

Security will be extremely tight amid concerns of possible theft or damage. Officials refused to say how much they had insured Lucy for or how much the Ethiopian government was being paid.

Lucy, her name taken from a Beatles song that played in an archaeological camp the night of her discovery, is the partial skeleton of what was once a 3 1/2-foot-tall adult of an ape-man species.

The fossilized remains were discovered in the remote, desert-like Afar region in northeastern Ethiopia by U.S. paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray.

The creature was a member of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago, and is the earliest known hominid.