The skeleton, flown out of Addis Ababa on Sunday, will be displayed across US museums with the aim of arousing tourist interest in a country better known to the outside world for famine, floods and other human suffering.

"The country needs to improve its image to the outside world," said Hapte-Sellasie Tafesse, a member of the Lucy Protection Committee and a former tourism minister.

"Lucy's tour is one of the tools by which this can be achieved. What's the use if the fossil is only used as a slogan when it can boost the country's tourism industry by gaining publicity," he said.

"New fossils are being found constantly in Ethiopia. The country should take advantage of Lucy before it loses its value," Hapte-Sellasie told AFP.

From 31 August, Lucy will enjoy top billing among 200 other Ethiopian heritage exhibits that will tour museums in 10 US cities for six years, beginning with the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences in Texas.

Lucy, named after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," was discovered by American paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 in Ethiopia's northern Afar region.

She was sent overseas just once ? for laboratory tests in the United States after being unearthed. Since then, Lucy has been stored in a special vault with a replica on display at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

Lucy, part of a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis, was for more than 20 years the earliest known member of the hominid family.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago and are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200 0000 years ago.

The discovery of several hominids in Ethiopia's Afar region has failed to boost tourists put off by political turmoil and natural calamities that have wracked the Horn of Africa nation.