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Maintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu. The common ancestor of placental mammals probably looked like Eomaia scansoria, the earliest known placental mammal, shown here in an artist's reconstruction based on a 125-million-year-old fossil skeleton found in China in 2002.aintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu. The common ancestor of placental mammals probably looked like Eomaia scansoria, the earliest known placental mammal, shown here in an artist's reconstruction based on a 125-million-year-old fossil skeleton found in China in 2002.
National Geographic News. Perhaps the world's most famous early human ancestor, the 3.2-million-year-old ape Lucy was the first Australopithecus afarensis skeleton ever found, though her remains are only about 40 percent complete (photo of Lucy's bones).iscovered in 1974 by paleontologist Donald C. Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia, A. afarensis was for about 20 years the earliest known human ancestor species (Africa map).