What species does the fossil "Lucy" belong to?

The fossil Lucy belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis.

Lucy, catalogued as AL 288-1, is a partial skeleton discovered at Hadar in Ethiopia on November 24, 1974. The find consists of several hundred fossilized bone fragments representing about 40 percent of a female skeleton. At roughly 3.2 million years old, it became one of the most famous fossils in the study of human evolution.

Her anatomy combines a relatively small, ape-like skull with evidence of upright, bipedal walking. That combination helped support the view that walking on two legs evolved before the large brains associated with later members of the human lineage. Scientists continue to debate how much time A. afarensis spent in trees.

Lucy’s nickname came from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the Beatles song played repeatedly at the excavation camp. In Amharic, she is also called Dinkinesh, meaning “you are marvelous.” Lucy was not Homo sapiens and was not a direct modern human ancestor in a simple parent-to-child sense; she represents an early branch of the hominin family tree.