41st Anniversary of the discovery of Lucy

On November 24th, 1974, as dusk settled upon the southern edge of the Afar Triangle near a village called Hadar, a team of scientists organized by Yves Coppens, Maurice Taieb and Donald Johanson toasted a tremendous discovery. They had been scouring this region for weeks--an area Taieb had brought to the forefront of anthropological research years earlier--and that morning their search paid enormous dividends with the find of Dr. Johanson and his student Tom Gray. The skeletal fragments unearthed in the Ethiopian landscape made up the most complete example of Australopithecus afarensis ever found. While they celebrated, a small tape recorder blared ”Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, again and again. And then it struck someone--what finer name than Lucy for the incredible specimen pulled from the sand that day? Google has created one of its trademark doodles to celebrate the 41s t anniversary of the discovery of the skeletal remains of 'Lucy' Australopithecus, who is proven to have lived around 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia. 40 per cent of Lucy's fossilised remains were discovered intact and paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson named her Lucy after the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. By studying her bones, in particular the structure of her knee and spine curvature, scientists discovered that she spent most of her time walking on two legs. Lucy resembled human beings very closely. She walked in an upright manner as humans do. Scientists believe Lucy was 3.7 feet tall and 29 kgs in weight. Although she walked upright, she was quite small in size compared to humans. Her skeletal remains are kept in a National Museum in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa and her plasticreplica is kept in the public for tourists to observe.