Lucy (fossil)

Hello. I don't have a voice like yours, but I have a story to tell. For a very, very long time—millions of years.—I was sleeping under the warm earth. I wasn't a person anymore, but a collection of bones slowly turning into stone. I couldn't remember walking under the sun or seeing the tall grasses sway in the wind. I just felt the quiet and the dark as layers of sand and dirt covered me like a heavy blanket. The world above me changed in ways I couldn't even imagine. Rivers flowed and dried up. Mountains rose and fell. New animals came and went. Through it all, I waited and waited, not knowing what I was waiting for, just resting in my silent, earthy bed. I was a secret hidden deep in the ground, a piece of a puzzle nobody knew existed yet.

Then one day, everything changed completely. It was November 24th, 1974. A scientist named Donald Johanson and his friends were carefully looking for clues about the past. They were in a hot, dry place called Hadar, in a country named Ethiopia. As they walked, one of them spotted a tiny piece of my arm bone poking out of the ground. It was me. Carefully, they started to brush away the dirt that had been my blanket for so very long. They found my leg bones, my ribs, and even parts of my skull. They were so excited they shouted with joy. That night, they celebrated at their camp and played a famous song on their tape recorder, 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. That’s how I got my name: Lucy. They studied me and learned something amazing. My knee and hip bones showed that even though I lived 3.2 million years ago, I walked on two legs, just like you. I wasn't an ape that climbed in trees all day, and I wasn't quite a modern human either. I was something special in between, a new clue in the story of people.

Today, my bones are very famous. I help scientists tell the story of where all people came from. You can think of me as a very important piece of a giant puzzle about the human family. I am one of your oldest, oldest relatives—like a great-great-great (say that a million times.) grandmother to everyone living on Earth today. I show you that the story of people is long and wonderful. My bones remind everyone that we are all connected in one big family tree that started a very long time ago in Africa. And who knows. There are more secrets just like me sleeping under the ground, just waiting for curious people like you to discover them. You might be the one to find the next piece of our amazing shared past and help tell even more of our family story.