Researchers made a virtual reconstruction of the leg and pelvic muscles — which are not preserved in fossils — of the female Australopithecus afarensis, or Lucy, who probably was “not a ...

When Lucy was discovered, she was “singular,” Sponheimer says. But subsequent research has uncovered hundreds of fossils from Australopithecus afarensis as well as other distinct hominin species and ...

Lucy and her kin were a group of hominins who inhabited East Africa some 2.9 to 3.9 million years ago. The pint-sized A. afarensis carried a mixture of ape-like and human-like features, hence the ...

A slow ape Bates and his colleagues created a 3D digital model of the ‘Lucy’ skeleton — a near-complete 3.2-million-year-old A. afarensis specimen discovered in Ethiopia half a century ago.

However, Haile-Selassie and colleagues discovered Australopithecus Afarensis fossils at the Woranso-Mille site, which is only 30 miles (48 km) north of the site in Ethiopia, where Lucy was discovered.

Lucy was identified as a member of a new species called Australopithecus afarensis. The debate over whether she was our ancestor, a grandmother to humanity and the missing link between apes and ...

But having Lucy and other members of A. afarensis helps scientists understand where variations turn into adaptations that define a new species. Lucy’s next 50 years ...

Thanks to Johanson's 1974 discovery of Lucy — as well as other important findings, like the "First Family" and the footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania — we now know quite a lot about A. afarensis.

For decades after Lucy's discovery, paleoanthropologists assumed A. afarensis was the only hominin that lived in this region during the middle Pliocene epoch (3 million to 4 million years ago).

If an efficient two-legged stance kept Lucy grounded, as suggested by another A. afarensis fossil find (SN: 6/21/10), then she probably died from some other cause.

Lucy’s discovery transformed our understanding of human origins. Don Johanson, who unearthed the Australopithecus afarensis remains in 1974, recalls the moment he found the iconic fossil.