In September 2007, the Houston Museum of Natural Science will open an exhibition featuring Ethiopia’s “Lucy,” a 3.1 million year old hominid who is one of the oldest links to humankind ever found.

Previously, the original skeleton has not been on public view, even in Ethiopia. A replica casting of the bones is on exhibit. It shows that approximately 40% of her skeleton is original, and those pieces are shown in brown. Simulated pieces that were not found with the skeleton are in white to distinguish them from the authentic pieces.

Lucy was probably about 20 years old, weighed just 60 pounds, and stood about 3 ½ feet tall. Pop culture gave the prehistoric female her name. She was named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Her discovery was significant because her skeleton pre-dated the earliest stone tools, indicating that our early human ancestors walked upright long before they were able to make simple tools. Her brain was only the size of a chimp’s, which also proved that our ancestors walked on two feet before their brains grew larger.

One year before finding Lucy, archeologist Don Johanson found a knee joint at the site. “At first I thought it was just from a monkey, maybe a baboon,” he said in a PBS documentary, “but it went together in a way that didn’t look like any monkey.”

The joint could be locked straight, which is what makes it possible to walk upright. Besides humans, no other living primate today has a knee joint like this. At the time of its discovery, the knee joint was one of the oldest fossils to show evidence of walking upright.

The following year, Johanson and his team went back to the site and found several more fragments, some extremely tiny. Archeology takes a tremendous amount of time and patience. Each piece was painstakingly excavated and later pieced together.

The team assembled the pieces into what became known as “Lucy,” an important piece in puzzle of human evolution.

The proposed traveling exhibit has created some controversy, however, because the original bones will be traveling outside of its country of origin where it has never been on public display. Also, some fear the stress of transport may be detrimental to the fragile bones.

Supporters argue that bringing Lucy to the United States will allow many of us to view and connect with one of our common pre-historic human ancestors, and that experience is truly priceless.