lucy’s baby

In a rare fit of openaccessmindedness, Nature have left the content about Baby Lucy, the latest hominid (hominin? am bad anthropologist and never keep up with this renaming thing) find from Ethiopia. She’s dated at 3.3 million years, and is a 3 year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, mostly skull but with a rare amount of other skeletal material.

What I always love about the reporting of hominin finds–and other major palaeo discoveries–is that you’d think the bones had been pulled out of the ground just a couple of days ago, when in reality the team involved have been studying them for five years.