Google pays tribute to Lucy the Australopithecus as it celebrates the 41st anniversary of its discovery. The Google Doodle for Tuesday, Nov. 24, features the animal, which bones were discovered on the same day in 1974.
Paleoanthropologists Yves Coppens, Maurice Taieb and Donald Johanson were able to achieve tremendous triumph 41 years ago in a village known as Hadar in Ethiopia when they unearthed the most complete fossil of Australopithecus afarensis ever found.
The team had been thoroughly searching for the place, which Taieb had highlighted in the anthropological research field prior to the group project.
As the dusk settled that morning, Johanson and his student Tom Gray were able to finally discover the elusive skeletal bones, pushing the project to its pinnacle.
During the moment of victory, a small tape recorder was said to had played the song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" by the Beatles over and over. One of the scientists then thought of deriving their discovery to that song hence, the name we all know now: Lucy.
Months and years later, different scientific bodies came up with new assumptions about bipedalism, creating new remarkable pages in the book of human evolution.
Google acknowledges this momentous event in history by reminding the world about it through Google Doodle.
"To recognize the 41st anniversary of this historic moment, Kevin Laughlin has brought Lucy and her upright gait to life on our homepage," Google wrote.
The animation is a clean and simple take on the so-called "March of Progress," which demonstrates the theory of evolution from apes to humans. Lucy can be seen right in the middle of an ape ambulating in a slump and a modern-day human standing up straight, signifying its important role in evolution.
When Lucy's bones were obtained, experts performed a carbon dating procedure and found that it was about 3.2 million years old. The findings came as a surprise because fossils retrieved with that age were typically deficient and significantly impaired.
At present, Lucy's skeleton is locked up in a safe at the National Museum of Ethiopia, which is close to where it was first unearthed. The display that the public can view at the museum is only a plaster replica. From 2007 to 2013, Lucy was toured across the United States amid fears of possible damages.
Photo: Tim Evanson | Flickr
