SMITHSONIAN MAG: Meeting Lucy: How a World-First European Exhibition Brought Visitors Face-to-Face With the Fossil That ‘Shrinks Time’

A special operations unit of the Czech police stood on the tarmac as an Ethiopian Airlines flight landed under partially cloudy skies at Prague’s Václav Havel Airport in August. The heightened security might have seemed ready to protect a head of state, but aboard this plane was a different type of celebrity. T

The guest of honor had been dead for more than three million years.

Meeting Lucy: How a World-First European Exhibition Brought Visitors Face to Face With the Fossil That ‘Shrinks Time’

 

Paige Madison

November 14, 2025 10:40 a.m.

For 60 days ending on October 23, the National Museum in Prague did something highly unusual: It displayed the fossilized bones of human ancestors. One is arguably the most famous fossil in the world: the Australopithecus Lucy. The other, often called “Lucy’s baby” despite being an older specimen, is a 3-year-old child of the same species, known as Selam.

The exhibition marked the first time either skeleton had gone on display in Europe. Usually, the fossils are locked in a specially built safe out of view of the public in the National Museum of Ethiopia, where they are national treasures—exceptional fragments of deep history.

The stories of Lucy and Selam unfolded long before our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved, and even before any of our hominin relatives journeyed outside of Africa. Yet for a short time, this distant chapter of the past was almost within reach for museum visitors, separated from the present by merely a pane of glass.

“When one stands next to fossils like these, time—three million years—shrinks,” Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago who discovered Selam, says in an email. That powerful feeling, he adds, stems from “coming close to a distant relative with whom we are all directly connected.”

Key takeaways: 

An unprecedented exhibition For the first time, two famous Australopithecus afarensis fossils named Lucy and Selam were shown together in a European exhibition.
Beyond their scientific value, these fossils have been called “cultural ambassadors,” building connections between Ethiopia, where they were found, and other nations.

LINK: Smithsonian Magazine