A Visit with Lucy: Part 1

Just a few weeks ago, as we were finalizing our plans for our Pacific Northwest road trip, an article about the traveling Lucy’s Legacy exhibit popped up on the web. Lucy is the Australopithecus afarensis that anthropologist Donald Johanson and his colleagues discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Her 3.2 million year old skeletal remains changed some fundamental ideas about humanity’s antiquity, and her story -- told in Lucy: The Beginnings of Human Kind, by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey -- fascinated me as a teenager and got me interested in writing about science.

The article said that the Lucy exhibit was appearing at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and that although the show had nearly run its course -- it ends this coming weekend, March 8, 2009 -- only about 60,000 of the anticipated 250,000 visitors had come to see it.

On Monday, March 2, I became one of those lucky few. I arrived at Seattle Center via the monorail, which started handily close to my hotel, an hour before my 11 a.m. entry time for the special exhibit. I used the electronic kiosk at the entry to print my pre-ordered and pre-paid tickets (for the showing of the IMAX film The Mystery of the Nile as well as the Lucy’s Legacy exhibit), then wandered through the museum’s nice but far-from-earth-shattering dinosaur exhibit. At the appointed time I presented myself at the special exhibit’s entry, and spent the next three hours immersed in Lucy’s Legacy.