Along with Maurice Taieb and Yves Coppens, he is known for discovering the fossil of a female hominid australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
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Pamela Alderman, a member of the expedition, suggested she be named "Lucy" after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" which was played repeatedly during the night of the discovery.
A member of the 1973 expedition to Hadar, the archeologist Donald Johanson, returned to Hadar the next year to make the first discovery of the remains of Lucy, a three million year old fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarensis.
Taieb, along with co-directors of IARE Donald Johanson and Yves Coppens played a key role in identifying the geology and history of the Afar region, which has yielded hominid specimens back to 6 million years old.
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The most famous fossil is the partial skeleton named Lucy (3.2 million years old) found by Donald Johanson and colleagues, who, in celebration of their find, repeatedly played the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
In 1972, Taieb invited Yves Coppens, a French paleontologist, Jon Kalb, an American geologist, and Donald Johanson, an American anthropologist, to survey the region in order to appraise the area’s field exploration potential.