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

Two Australopithecus fossils named Lucy and Selam made a rare trip out of Ethiopia for a 60-day display at the National Museum in Prague

Paige Madison

November 14, 2025

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

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.”

The ancestors

Both Lucy and Selam are relatively complete skeletons of Australopithecus afarensis, a species of small-brained, upright-walking apes that lived between about 2.9 million and 4.2 million years ago in Africa. Where exactly the species sits in our family tree is not yet settled, with scientists debating whether the early hominins are direct ancestors of Homo sapiens or a close side branch. But whether Lucy is a great-great-great grandmother, or great-great-great aunt, her discovery provided a key snapshot of a crucial moment in our evolutionary story.

When American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson first spotted an arm bone eroding out of a hillside in the badlands of Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, he had no idea he’d found what would become history’s most famous skeleton. That night, his research team played the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” as they celebrated—the source of the fossil’s nickname—before returning to collect the rest of the fragments the next morning.

Lucy’s remains amount to 47 bones—ribs, jaw, pelvis, arm and leg bones and a partial skull—from a female who stood about three and a half feet tall and lived nearly 3.2 million years ago. Her Ethiopian name is Dink’inesh, meaning “you are marvelous” in Amharic.

At the time of her discovery, Lucy was the oldest and most complete early human ancestor ever found, a title she held for decades. She provided undisputable evidence that walking upright came long before big brains in our evolutionary story. Lucy’s skull, or what survives of it, once held a brain barely larger than a chimpanzee’s. But her legs—like ours—were built for life on two limbs, adapted for movement on the ground rather than in the trees.

Selam, meanwhile, lived about 100,000 years before Lucy, just miles from Hadar. Alemseged discovered her in 2000 in his home country of Ethiopia, and her preservation is extraordinary in ways that surpass even Lucy. Selam includes a nearly complete skull and torso, parts of a foot and limbs, vertebrae and impossibly small collar bones. Because she died so young, her bones capture an exceptional snapshot of growth and childhood in our ancestors.

Together, the adult and child make this long-lost species feel less like an abstraction and more like something achingly tangible. They were individuals who lived, breathed and moved through a prehistoric landscape.

Even today, says Michal Lukeš, the National Museum’s director general, these specimens are stunningly rare, two of only a dozen or so distant fossil ancestors that are so complete. Lucy and Selam, he says, “are part of our story—key to understanding human history.”

Creating a historic exhibition

Displaying Lucy and Selam was a “dream” for Lukeš and for the National Museum, according to an August statement. The museum has undergone extensive renovation in recent years, updating multiple permanent galleries and attracting a host of temporary exhibitions. While preparing a new gallery called People and Their Ancestors, the museum decided to display Lucy and Selam in connection with its opening. The gallery, curated by Petr Velemínský, head of the museum’s anthropology department, covers millions of years of human evolution, tying prehistory to more recent events in the region. Lukeš says the goal was to offer something extraordinary while underscoring the fossils’ significance through the larger gallery.

Negotiations between Ethiopia and the Czech Republic took three years and involved both countries’ prime ministers. According to a statement from Prague’s National Museum, “The loan of these two exceptional fossils marks the first step in mutual cooperation of museums in both countries.”

For Ethiopia, the exhibit was a chance to advertise its tourism opportunities. “We’re promoting Ethiopia’s historical artifacts alongside our renowned tourist destinations,” Abebaw Ayalew, director-general of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority, said in an interview. “Prague is a historical city that attracts tourists from various European countries, offering a fantastic opportunity to promote our historical heritage.”

A multistory banner that hung outside the museum showed Lucy’s face, illustrated by paleoartist Élisabeth Daynès, gazing across Prague’s medieval rooftops. It set up a stark contrast—time measured in centuries confronting time measured in millions of years.

The fossils’ display in Prague was nothing short of extraordinary, given that it marked only the second time Lucy has been on view outside Africa—and the first time for Selam. The bones traveled in specially designed boxes, accompanied by police escorts at both ends. During the exhibition, strict security protocols remained in place.

Public interest in the exhibit was overwhelming. Tickets often sold out, drawing Czech visitors and tourists from abroad. More than 210,000 people walked through the exhibition’s doors. Lukeš says the response was “truly extraordinary.”

Creating a connection

When I entered the fossils’ gallery in Prague this fall, the first thing I noticed was the darkness. Overhead lights were switched off; only a few lamps and carefully arranged spotlights cast light precisely where needed. The design guided visitors to focus on its centerpiece: a thigh-high, black display case crafted in the shape of Ethiopia.

To see Lucy, visitors approached the case and leaned forward, peering down through a glass panel to where she lay recessed, atop a black background. No photos were allowed. A guard stood close, watching for anyone who might break the rules or touch the glass.

The effect was almost choreographed. Visitors entered and moved clockwise around the case. Lucy rested at six o’clock and Selam at ten, with etched waterways tracing Ethiopia’s geography spanning the tabletop between them.

Kai Caspar, a zoologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf who visited from Germany, later described the atmosphere to me as “contemplative.” No one spoke above a whisper; it was quiet enough to hear voices echoing from other rooms and the shuffle of feet on the wooden floor.

Above the bones, standing on the case, were hyper-realistic reconstructions of the two ancestors sculpted by Daynès. The reimagined Lucy, complete with light fur and dark brown eyes, lifted a leafy twig to her mouth—its green the only splash of color across the display. Caspar adds that he “enjoyed the simplicity of the gallery” and was “moved” by seeing the fossils in person.

The hushed gallery felt almost devotional. People looked down at the fragments, up at the reconstructed faces, and down again. Most clasped their hands behind their back as they leaned forward, with adults lingering longer over the bones and children studying the realistic figures. A teenager whispered “Aus-tra-lo-pith-e-cus” to himself three times, sounding out the syllables until it stuck. One girl pointed to her own lower jaw while examining Lucy’s. A visitor who was in high school when Lucy was discovered called meeting her a “once in a lifetime” experience. Another, who traveled from the Netherlands, teared up in the gallery.

There was something unexpectedly intimate about the encounter. Dinosaur exhibitions, in comparison, tend to “emphasize the striking differences” between the prehistoric reptiles and species alive today, Caspar reflects. But human origins exhibits “highlight the similarities with us,” he adds. The result replaces the sense of alien wonder one gets from standing before a T. rex with something closer to recognition. We can see ourselves in these bones.

Museums around the world display replicas of Lucy; her skeleton has been copied and duplicated countless times. Even at the National Museum of Ethiopia, where Lucy’s bones typically reside, visitors can only access a replica. But seeing the real bones of Lucy and Selam is different. “I could not help but feel a sense of connection to them,” Caspar says, adding that a replica “simply cannot compare; experiencing the actual specimens just has a fundamentally different quality to it.”

“Showing an original fossil creates a special moment between the fossil and the museum visitor,” writer and science historian Lydia Pyne says in an email. In a temporary exhibition, that fleeting chance to “create a connection” with an ancestor like Lucy is part of its power, she adds.

Displaying rare fossils

In life, Lucy probably never wandered far from where she was born. Her short legs were built for a woodland existence, not for long treks across the open savanna. But in death, she’s become more of a globe-trotter.

Prior to this European exhibition, Lucy had left her home continent only once since Johanson completed his initial study of the fossil at the Cleveland Museum in 1980. The bones took a controversial tour across the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. Ethiopia’s former minister of culture and tourism Mohamoud Dirir said at the time that the tour would “put Ethiopia on the map as the cradle of mankind and of civilization.” But the trip ignited fierce debate among scientists, as well as some members of the public, with many raising concerns over the risks to such rare, fragile specimens.

Some of that concern stemmed from a UNESCO agreement that, less than a decade earlier in 1998, scientists from around the world had signed. It stated that fossils of human ancestors should not be transported out of their home countries unless there are “compelling scientific reasons” to make the journey. Several major institutions, including the Smithsonian, refused to participate in the tour, with some paleoanthropologists worrying Lucy’s travels could set a dangerous precedent, resulting in other rare fossils leaving Africa and increasing the risks to their wellbeing.

Even Alemseged, who was not involved in planning the recent exhibition, admits mixed feelings about the bones traveling. “These iconic specimens are irreplaceable,” he says. Each journey brings a degree of risk for the fossils—from vibration to temperature changes that might damage the bones.

Yet there are other calculations to be made. “We must also look at the significance of these precious specimens to society and the countries of their origin,” paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of Arizona State University says in an email. Originally from Ethiopia and now directing the Institute of Human Origins that Lucy’s discoverer Johanson founded, Haile-Selassie adds that fossils like Lucy “are becoming as important for diplomacy, for connections between countries and their people, and for tourism, as they are for science.”

Pyne calls these fossils “cultural ambassadors” as well as “emissaries of deep time.” The Prague exhibition embodied that idea with banners near the exit that invited visitors to Ethiopia, the land that has given the world so many of its most precious ancestors. With the case’s design also evoking the country, it linked the fossils to their birthplace.

Some people waited an hour for their turn to lean over that case, to encounter a distant relative they’ll likely never meet again. Alemseged speaks of fossils as tangible connections to the animal world and the universe, which adds to their “awe and intimacy.”

That intimacy filled the room. Now, the fossils have returned to Addis Ababa and their controlled safe. But for a short time, thousands came to see Lucy and Selam resting in Prague, bowing before our ancestors, seeking a deeper understanding of where we come from.