Lucy fossil controversy - August 31, 2007
Nearly a month after she was, in the words of Pravda, “spirited out of Ethiopia” fossil superstar Lucy has gone on display in a Houston museum. The Houston Chronicle has compiled a celebratory ‘day in the life’ of the three million year old hominid; other papers are more interested in the controversy her US visit has caused. When it was announced the fragile remains would be undertaking a six-year tour experts including palaeontologist Richard Leakey condemned the move (Washington Post). “Quite simply, the Smithsonian position is that the fossil Lucy, one of the most important specimens of its kind, is too fragile to go on public tour," a spokesman for the museum said at the time (AP).
The Arizona Republic had a word with one of the people who discovered Lucy in the first place. Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University, thinks the gruelling tour schedule could be detrimental to her health. “Lucy is one of a kind, fragile and invaluable to the science of paleoanthropology. There are always dangers when an irreplaceable object is travelled.” Reuters notes that the remains have only been briefly displayed in the country where they were found. The Ethiopian National Museum prefers to display a replica.
Image: Lucy fossil / Houston Museum of Natural Science
Comments
I remember studying lucy in my evolutionary genetics module. The advancement with science today is just astonishing and with new technqiues being developed such as 45 sequencing for analysing ancient DNA hopefully one day we can learn a lot more about our evolutionary past
Posted by: Sharaz | June 15, 2008 05:40 PM