Leicester Skeleton Is Richard III

News February 4, 2013

SHARE:
(Richard III Society, via Wikimedia Commons)

LEICESTER, ENGLAND—DNA tests have confirmed that the skeletal remains discovered beneath a parking lot last year are those of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle. It was known that Richard III was killed in 1485, during the Battle of Bosworth, and buried at the church of the Greyfriars. But the church was eventually torn down and the grave lost. The bones, which are of a slender man is his late 20s or early 30s, show that he suffered from scoliosis and potentially fatal injuries to the skull. They have been carbon-dated to between 1455 and 1540. “There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig. In short, the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III,” explained Turi King, a geneticist for the University of Leicester project. “Beyond a reasonable doubt it’s Richard,” added lead archaeologist Richard Buckley. The remains will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. 

  • Features January/February 2013

    Neolithic Europe’s Remote Heart

    One thousand years of spirituality, innovation, and social development emerge from a ceremonial center on the Scottish archipelago of Orkney

    Read Article
    Adam Stanford/Aerial Cam
  • Features January/February 2013

    The Water Temple of Inca-Caranqui

    Hydraulic engineering was the key to winning the hearts and minds of a conquered people

    Read Article
    Caranqui-opener
    (Courtesy Tamara L. Bray)
  • Letter from France January/February 2013

    Structural Integrity

    Nearly 20 years of investigation at two rock shelters in southwestern France reveal the well-organized domestic spaces of Europe's earliest modern humans

    Read Article
  • Artifacts January/February 2013

    Pacific Islands Trident

    A mid-nineteenth-century trident illustrates a changing marine ecosystem in the South Pacific

    Read Article
    (Catalog Number 99071 © The Field Museum, [CL000_99071_Overall], Photographer Christopher J. Philipp)