Perhaps the worlds most famous early human ancestor, the 3.2-million-year-old ape Lucy was the first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton ever found, though her remains are only about 40 percent complete (photo of Lucys bones).

Likewise, where is the real Lucy? The “real” Lucy is stored in a specially constructed safe in the Paleoanthropology Laboratories of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Because of the rare and fragile nature of many fossils, including hominids, molds are often made of the original fossils.

Furthermore, how is Lucy different than modern humans?

All in all, Lucy looks like a halfway house between apes and humans. She was ape-like in appearance and brain size, but she could walk upright like more advanced hominins that lived later. When she was discovered, Lucy was hailed as the oldest direct ancestor of modern humans.

Why is Lucy the hominid so important?

During that return journey, Johanson spotted a forearm bone, identified it — and then kept looking, where the two found a huge set of bones that would eventually represent 40 per cent of the entire skeleton. The discovery was so important because it entirely upset our understanding of the process of evolution.