HOUSTON -- The first-ever public display of Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old fossil discovered in Ethiopia, is scheduled for Houston in 2006, to the chagrin of some anthropologists who fear the project will harm the partial skeleton.

	Houston Museum of Natural Science Fossil remains of Australopithecus afarensi, known as Lucy, are displayed April 7 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The most complete fossilized skeleton ever recovered, Lucy is estimated to be 3.2 million years old. Click photo for larger image.

Ethiopia, the east African country where Lucy is stored in a museum safe, hopes to encourage tourism and investment by offering the treasure to the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

"Nobody is happy about exporting the original Lucy outside of Ethiopia," said Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. "People think the export might endanger Lucy."

The fossil makes up about 40 percent of a skeleton of a woman who died sometime between her 25th and 30th birthdays. She is the "most complete, best-preserved skeleton of any erect-walking human ancestor that has ever been found," according to "Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind," a book co-written by Donald Johanson, one of her discoverers.

Johanson and other anthropologists who unearthed the fossil at Hadar in 1974 named her after the famous Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" during a celebration over the find with music and beer. The skeleton, according to anthropologists, indicated that our ancestors were upright before the earliest stone tools -- and before the brains of such hominids got bigger.

The Houston museum would be responsible for organizing a possible four-year U.S. tour for Lucy once the final details of a memorandum of understanding are worked out and the agreement finalized with Ethiopia's Tourism Commission.

Other stops could include New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.

"It is a dream for the entire museum," said Dirk Van Tuerenhout, curator of anthropology at the Houston museum. "But for the department, the field of anthropology, it is like the Holy Grail coming over."

Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, is one of the discoverers of Lucy. Click photo for larger image.

Negotiations between the Ethiopian government and the Houston museum continue over which items from hundreds of thousands of years of Ethiopian history will accompany Lucy. The museum would like to include some of the crowns, regalia and manuscripts written in a language that is no longer spoken.

By allowing Lucy to take the overseas trip, Ethiopian officials hope to offer an image of their country different from the stereotypical picture of famine and war, said Gezahgen Kebede, president of Houston's Ethio-American Trade and Investment Council.

Haile-Selassie, who moved from Ethiopia to the United States about a decade ago, said other museums have exhibited casts of the Lucy fossil and says the Houston museum could do the same.

"What is the difference if you display a good cast or an original?" he asked. "Why would you put it in a safe while it is in its country of origin and then take it out in another country?"

But Van Tuerenhout says people want to see the real skeleton, not a cast, and Lucy hasn't been displayed in Ethiopia because no safe way exists there to show her.

"Of course, we would love for the people in Ethiopia to see her first, but right now the government itself and the museum itself has felt that is not a possibility," Van Tuerenhout said. "The infrastructure is not there and those are their words, not mine."

The fossil would travel "first-class" to Houston, he said. A special travel case would be constructed.

At the end of the U.S. tour, all the items associated with exhibit -- any computer programs, display cases, background information and lighting -- will go to Ethiopia, so people there can finally see the fossil, Van Tuerenhout said.

If the Ethiopian government wants to share Lucy, no one can really stand in its way, said Bernard Wood, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology at The George Washington University. But it's not a precedent Wood and other anthropologists like.

"Paleoanthropologists and the curators of well-supported museums in the United States really should find another way of getting funds to these African museums," Wood said. "Lucy is your ancestor and my ancestor and everyone else's ancestor. It is money talking and I don't think money ought to be allowed to talk."

Houston museum officials would not say if they were providing funding or other support to the Ethiopian government or national museum in exchange for the exhibit. Museum spokeswoman Lydia Baehr said the cost incurred by the museum to put together the exhibit and secure Lucy's safe passage would be included in the final contract, which she said will be confidential.

Haile-Selassie said when casts of the Lucy fossil are shown abroad "it is natural for the Ethiopian National Museum, as a museum in a third world, to expect financial and material support."

Texas Secretary of State Geoff Connor said the Lucy exhibit could bring with it an economic impact of $5 million to $7 million, which he called a conservative estimate.

Wood, however, believes taking the original Lucy out of her country for public display is "scientifically irresponsible."

"It is almost certain that if Lucy is going around the states for four years to various venues, some parts of it are going to get broken ... no matter how careful you are," he said.

Van Tuerenhout said the museum is "fully aware" of Lucy's scientific importance and will do everything possible to safeguard her and the other Ethiopian artifacts that will be included in the exhibit.

"The exhibit itself, including Lucy and all the other things, was a project that was originated by the Ethiopian government," Van Tuerenhout said. "It is the government that is ultimately the owner and is responsible for these international treasures."

If Lucy comes to Houston, it won't be the first time the museum has featured a world treasure, Van Tuerenhout added.

In February 2003, hundreds of priceless items from 2,000 years of the Roman Catholic papacy were shown. Many had been stored in Vatican collections and not normally displayed, even in Rome.

This fall, the museum will feature the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the earliest surviving text of the books of the Hebrew Bible and rarely seen outside of Jerusalem.

"We are pinching ourselves," he said of Lucy's expected visit. "Everybody is very enthusiastic about it, and excited about it, and looking at ourselves saying, 'Can you believe it? Can you believe it?'"