“‘This is huge. This is the biggest discovery really since the “Lucy” skeleton of the 1970s,’ said Carol Ward, a University of Missouri paleoanthropologist.” Anthropologists
uncover and painstakingly recreate a potentially very important skeletal find in the 4.4 million-year-old
Ardipithecus ramidus, a.k.a. Ardi. “
David Pilbeam, a Harvard paleontologist, noted…’This is an extraordinary achievement, of discovery, recovery, reconstitution, description and analysis, which will keep many others busy for at least another 15 years.’“
“If the scientists who found Ardi are correct, she represents a transitional figure, almost a hybrid — a tree creature who could carry food in her arms as she explored the woodland floor on two legs…’Ardi tells us twice as much as Lucy did. We have hands and feet, a more complete environment, a more complete skeleton, it’s older, it’s more primitive, it shows us the process of transformation from common ancestor to hominid,’ said C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University who was part of the Ardi team.”
