The Associated Press reports that “Lucy” aka Australopithecus afarensis will be making a six-year, multi-city tour beginning September 2007. The Museum of Natural Science in Houston, which has been negotiating the international exhibition of the alleged 3.2 million-year-old skeleton, will be the first stop in the United States. Other cities include Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York, and Denver. Additional exhibitions have yet to be announced.

Discovered in Ethiopia by U.S. paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974, the fossilized remains have been touted as one of the most significant “missing links” in the chain of evolution from primates to humans.

Essentially an ape-like creature that walked upright from time to time, Lucy “was quite like a bonobo chimpanzee,” according to ICR president Dr. John Morris, “with a chimp-sized brain, long curved fingers and toes for climbing trees, a protruding face, and large molar teeth.”

Despite Lucy’s celebrity status in the evolutionary sciences, the AP admits that debate “still rages over how close an ancestor to man Lucy would be, as many experts suspect she was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.”

Which is exactly what God has said all along (Genesis 1:24-31).

Read the entire Associated Press article here.

See also ICR scientist Frank Sherwin’s related article, "Oh Baby! Another Missing Link Discovered," which discusses the recent find of an alleged child-like Australopithecus afarensis.