Famed fossil unveiled on eve of tour

HOUSTON -- After six years of planning and negotiations, and a controversy reverberating through the scientific community, the world's most famous fossil made her debut Tuesday.

Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis, was unveiled during a media preview at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where she will be the centerpiece of an exhibit opening Friday.

"Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia" features more than 150 religious and cultural artifacts from Ethiopia -- a part of the exhibit that museum officials and the Ethiopian government worry may be overshadowed by the furor surrounding Lucy.

The decision to bring Lucy to Houston for public display spurred outrage among the world's most noted paleoanthropologists -- including famed fossil hunter Richard Leakey -- who say the fragile fossil could be irreparably damaged by the travel to Houston and a subsequent six-year tour.

Noted museums such as The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York refused offers to exhibit Lucy. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where Lucy was studied for six years after her discovery in 1974, also refused to show her. But The Field Museum in Chicago said it was working out the final details for exhibition possibly as late as 2010.

The Houston exhibit marks the first time Lucy has been on view in public outside Ethiopia, where she has only been exhibited twice.

However, about half of the exhibit is devoted to telling nearly 3,000 years of Ethiopian history, starting with the ancient Aksum civilization in the first century A.D. and ending with the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, the year Lucy was discovered.

Ethiopian government officials hope the exhibit will spark tourism and dispel the image of the country as a war-torn, famine-plagued land.

But Lucy is indeed the star of this show.

After passing through the rooms devoted to Ethiopian history, visitors enter three dimly lit chambers. In the first two, the exhibit focuses on the prehistoric era. In the third, a darkened circular room, they meet Lucy.

Her skeleton, lying flat inside a sleek glass and black case, is dusted by soft lighting. Around her, a 78-foot-long mural tells the story of 6 million years of human evolution. Near the fossil, a life-size model of what Lucy might have looked like stands encased in her own glass enclosure, observing the viewer with a half-smile.

Lucy, a hominid fossil named after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," was discovered in the remote Afar province in northeastern Ethiopia. Although not the oldest human ancestor ever found, her skeleton is among the most complete, with about 40 percent of her bones intact.