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'Ardi's' skeleton is stored in a vault at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis-Ababa. It took Middle Awash scientists many years to clean the skeleton. Most pieces were brought to the museum in blocks of matrix - the consolidated ancient sediment that originally surrounded them at the excavation site. Through years of painstaking work, most of the fragile fossilized bones were carefully removed from this matrix. As a precaution, several fossil pieces, including a rib, have been preserved... |
| Take a look at some closeups of 'Ardi's' bones: |
| Artist-naturalist Jay Matternes has been illustrating and reconstructing human ancestors and their close relatives for over 50 years. He combines his artistic talents with his encyclopedic knowledge of primate anatomy to bring fossils to life. Matternes spent 10 years working with the Middle Awash research team to produce several life-size, anatomically accurate drawings of 'Ardi.' From these drawings, Discovery artists created computer animations depicting how 'Ardi' might have moved... |
