Donald Johanson: When I found Lucy in 1974, I was walking in a very desolate, remote part of Ethiopia known as Hadar. At the Hadar site we had found fossilized remains of all kinds of animals. Elephants, rhinos, gazelles, monkeys, and so on. But our main goal, of course, was to find as many human ancestor fossils as we could. We had found some things in 1973 that titillated us and alerted us to the fact that these geological deposits would, in fact, have human ancestor fossils. On this November morning, it was about noon, I was heading back to my Land Rover to drive back to camp. And I happened to look over my right shoulder. And as I did so, I saw a fragment of a bone which I recognized as coming from the elbow region in a skeleton, and that it was too small to be anything but one of these hominids. And the anatomy was right. And almost instantaneously, I was with a student of mine at that time, Tom Gray, we realized that there were fragments of her, of this skeleton, that were distributed along a slope. There was a piece of a leg, there was a piece of a pelvis, there was a piece of a jaw, there was a piece of a skull. And I realized almost instantaneously that we had part of a skeleton. Normally, we are happy to find a fragment of jaw, a few isolated teeth, a bit of an arm, a bit of a skull. But to find associated body parts is extremely rare. I realized that no matter what it was, even if it was from a creature that we already knew about, another kind of human ancestor that had already been studied and named and so on, it was going to be important because so few discoveries had arms associated with legs, bits of skull associated with a pelvis. I realized immediately that this was a terribly important find, a terribly important discovery, but I didn’t realize at the moment how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.