King Richard III: Unseen Footage of His Skeleton | History Documentary | Reel Truth History

The discovery of Richard the Third made headlines around the world. King Richard the Third was found buried under a par

king

lot. Earthly remains of the last Plantagenet King, but much of what happened behind the scenes has never been revealed if I put this trench 50 centimeters further east I would have missed it completely. Our

documentary

team followed the entire process from the first trench to the final test. You take the teeth and then crush them. You try to extract the DNA. The only television crew to observe the The scientists wor

king

on this film, those involved tell the full story.

That's what I think also delivered that wound on the top of the head with new revelations. It is possible that this individual's hands were tied at the point where he was buried and surprising twists. Jerry. Thinking that she could possibly be a woman was almost like having to think about planning emigration at that stage. This is the inside clue to one of the best archaeological detective stories ever told. The search for the lost king of England. Summer 2012. The search for Ricardo's remains began. the third, the last English king to die in battle. The car park's location in Leicester is not the usual cemetery for a king, but there is an explanation for our turbulent

history

.

Richard was killed at Bosworth in 1485 in a battle for the crown. He is one of our most important. Monix's and later Shakespeare's notorious historian tutors cemented his reputation as the archetypal villain. I can smile and murder while I smile and cry content with what afflicts my heart and wet my cheeks with artificial tears and frames my face on all the occasions when they took his body. to Greyfriars Church in Leicester, 14 miles away, he was quickly buried in a simple tomb, the building was destroyed during the Reformation and the tomb was lost there, the story would have ended if it were not for Philippa Langley, a member of the Society Richard the Third. a group dedicated to rehabilitating her reputation it is really important that we get to the moji of a level as soon as possible she joined forces with archaeologists from the University of Leicester putting together different maps of Leicester they calculated the approximate location of the convent which proved the ancient maps surprisingly accurate the 18th century streets on the 18th century map and the modern streets still lined up.

Philip commissioned a radar survey of the site, but it was inconclusive. The only way to know if Richard was still there was to dig into the idea of ​​actually finding an anonymous individual, especially Richard, a third party, I thought was a very, very remote possibility, seemed completely crazy. One thing you don't do in archeology is not look for famous people. I confess, I think we were all quite skeptical. In fact, we would find anything. I remember being there the first day. Well, everything will be fine. We won't find anything. Everything will be fine. Thinking there are some bones on top, so maybe a

skeleton

.

I was there to witness everything realistically. I thought we'd be fine with just finding some convent buildings, digging, doing a bit of sample excavation, closing it up and that's it, but it soon became clear that there will be more to this project than we wrote, thought of The First Trench on Day One , the site's director, Matt Morris, made an intriguing find, but no one yet realized its significance. I saw a little bit of bone sticking out and now that wasn't particularly surprising, we know it's a church in the area we know it. It has a cemetery, fortunately I missed the machining of the

skeleton

's legs with bone.

I think it may be human bone, so what we got we found human bone. They appear to be two legs parallel to each other, which to me suggests that it is a jointed rather than simply loose human burial. The bones hit the ground, so now that we know it's articulated we can't touch it until we get permission from headquarters to deal with the human remains. Well, what we can do is clean it up everywhere, clean up all the loose debris and then we'll have a good idea if we have any more burials in the area, if we can see any other features that might relate to a cemetery or to the convent, so that's good news, it's been a good first day, Matt.

I had no evidence that these remains had any connection to Richard, the challenge was still finding the convent, locating the church and pinpointing the choir area where he was supposedly buried. Thick and fast window glass began to appear and architectural fragments like this really mean that If we are looking at a site of very high status and almost certainly religious in nature, the first two trenches quickly revealed the location of the convent cloisters and the hall. capitulate. The church had to be nearby and there were clues in the trench, a wall as wide as you What I have suggested carries a lot of weight, yes, and it is different to know what kind of buildings within the Priory would be if it were not the church.

There was enough money for one more trench which they decided to dig on the north side. An inspired choice. which gave me the opportunity to make my first archaeological finds, my own eggs, we started to find a lot of floor surfaces, a lot of mortar floor surfaces, instantly a great candidate for the church, in fact there is nothing else that could really Having been in just over a week, the team had achieved more than they dared to hope for. The first two trenches supported the cloisters of the convent and the chapter house Trent 3 revealed the position of the church and more evidence Richard here is where and when you were on the other side in that trench you said you wanted two things you can find on this side the walls, the thieves' walls go in this direction, yes, and then, with luck, something like a choir, which would mean that that's where Richard could be buried, so we got really excited, I mean what we wanted was really just to have a wall. there we wanted to make a building, yes, and then we have a mortar floor area in the middle, so yes, that's exactly what we wanted.

What happened next took me by surprise, the team realized that the church choir could be extended to the end. In the first trench and down to the leg bones found on the first day, suddenly the body became much more interesting, which meant that it was a grave within the East End of the church in the perfect position in the church to really It was worth exhuming something we had gone to. From doubting we'd ever find anything to having managed to get all the trenches exactly where we needed them to answer everything we were looking for, this is where Matt found the bones, and they're doing some pretty serious work.

There, the pioneers are going to excavate another section of that wall so that we can enter the container. Are we worried about bricks falling? Now I have it well padded and the skeleton is not really exposed. the ground will be a protected site University of Leicester bone expert Joe Appleby was called in to excavate the skeleton. She wore protective clothing not to protect her but to make sure her DNA didn't contaminate the bones she was about to investigate. Here we have discovered something that we go with our legs, yes, Joseph found a skull in the grave, yes, it is a little problem knowing that it seems to be much higher than where we had our legs, right?

I'm very excited because it appears to be a hole in the skull. Ten minutes where I was basically knocking him down with this static here and unfortunately that went into the top of the skull, that's what it's called, that's right, I dug up the legs, they appear to be normal, I exposed the arms again, there was no sign. that something out of the ordinary was happening until I started excavating the spine, the first vertebrae were completely normal, we were doing exactly what I expected, but when I got to about the fifth vertebra from the bottom, suddenly the next one appeared. one wasn't where I expected it to be and I couldn't find it.

I then spent a bit of time excavating the area around it to try to figure out what had happened and discovered that the next vertebra was considerably displaced. On the one hand, that was something that made me aware that we might be dealing with something out of the ordinary because one thing we know about Richard, the third is that he reportedly has a crooked back, the feeling from that point was really one of Growing disbelief I didn't at all expect to find Richard's skeleton. The third discovery of the bones was very fortunate as Matt admitted it almost never happened.

We were quite blind when we came to open the trenches just to show how improbable the task of finding him was. If I had put my trench 50 centimeters further east, I would have missed it completely and we would never have known it was there once I realized how close I came to missing it. Here are the few fir trees that are nearby, but the The king had been discovered then this medieval skeleton was about to embark on another journey into the realm of 21st century science. September 2012, archaeologists at the University of Leicester were gathered around a hole in the ground containing a lost king of England and I didn't quite know it. how to react yeah, the best thing I can say in terms of watching the burial will be to say oh yeah, it's another Barrow, how interesting and all that kind of stuff, but I'm actually saying that for myself because it's humanized by the fact that this was potentially the barrier we were looking for, we can put a name to it and we've seen portraits of him and we knew what he did and the fact that he died in battle was actually a very moving moment in many ways, so I think yeah, I'd be lying if not say the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I looked into this hole and I saw the curved spine and I saw the skull with evidence of trauma, so it was quite a great moment, really yeah, sadly it felt like I had a minute extraction, a little head at the east end of the church in the choir. curved column.

Did we really manage to do this? Yes. Yes, the live spine of the left femur was the last thing we needed to lift. To deal with a bunch of calves, this was obviously going to be something that was going to need to be intact and carefully examined in the lab. The skeleton had only been discovered a few hours but Joe was already able to reconstruct part of what was extraordinary. The story these bones can tell is that it was clear that the body had been thrown to the ground with more haste than respect, that the body had been slightly crushed inside the grave, so that the head was actually quite pushed against the end. and something that was quite interesting is that the position of the hands is a little strange for a medieval burial, there they were crossed over the pelvis, but slightly to the side, it is possible that this indicates that this individual's hands were still tied in that point. that was buried stripped of its features by a feigned nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time to this breathing world, barely half invented and that, so lame and out of fashion that the dogs barked at me when I stopped next to them , this individual was placed in a very simple place. built tomb, we have no evidence of any kind of crafting on it, we don't have a coffin for example, any other kind of accessories for the tomb, so it must have gone in as it was or possibly in a shroud, but none of that has remained if that were the case the lack of grave goods made the archaeologists' job much more difficult there were no tombstones or inscriptions or mementos the only way to prove the identity of the skeletons was in the bones themselves as we walked away, although most of the skeleton was in the box in the back Joe actually had the skull on and that the skull was the one we were going to take DNA from when we kept it separate because we had to put it in the refrigerator it was all neatly wrapped and we can just risk rolling or rolling in the van so she held it carefully as we drove away that was kind of surreal this box of bones was about to create a huge scandal the Leicester team made their first announcement this could be Richard we have a man with what appeared to be battle wounds suffering from severe scoliosis whose curvature of the spine was buried respectfully but modestly in the place of honor in the convent church.

Clearly, we are all very excited about these latest discoveries. This is potentially a historic moment for the University in the city of Leicester, but behind the scenes the team had a huge amount of work to do, there would be CT scans, carbon dating, DNA sequencing, facial reconstruction, skeletal analysis, every piece of evidence had to support his case, it is a great responsibility. At a fairly early stage in my career, if something goes wrong with this, it will be very, very detrimental to me, so yes, it stresses me out. A small blow, it would all come to nothing if scientists could not prove that it was Richard, the geneticist Torrey King.

One of the jobsThe hardest thing he had was finding fragile DNA in bones that were 500 years old. When working with ancient remains, you have to be very careful with contamination. One of the biggest problems with ancient DNA is contamination with modern DNA. What he assured us was that while we did some digging and lifted the Skelly, Joe was working in extremely clean conditions when we looked at the Skelly we were fully suited up, we had face masks on, we were double gloved to ensure an accurate DNA result at every step . I had to double check with two separate lamps.

The skeletal remains were in very good condition. Now it doesn't necessarily guarantee that you'll be able to get ancient DNA from them because it depends entirely on the conditions of the soil and what was there. hoping to get teeth and that's because that's the most likely thing left, they're usually very well preserved, so what you do is you take the teeth and you take them to a clean room, you clean them very carefully and then you crush them . turn them into powder and then try to extract the DNA from that powder. It sounds simple, but ancient DNA breaks down into thousands of tiny fragments, putting them together takes months of painstaking work.

While Joe Fov took care of the bones still covered in mud, she had to examine each bone in painstaking detail looking for clues to this person's identity. We're going to take a CT scan of the skeleton. The idea of ​​that is that it gives us a good 3D record and it will allow us to see in more detail the nature of the trauma and also potentially the spinal abnormality. Help was available at the city hospital, who are about to receive a very unusual injury. patient, obviously a hospital scanner is mainly used for hospital patients. We are allowed to use it at night because it is usually free at that time, but when we tried to do this before there was a major accident and they had to use it for patients. so we had to try Baskin, that is very good and exactly as it should be, and several of the molars can be removed for ancient DNA analysis.

Removing them was absolutely terrifying, so sitting there for about three hours gently moving my teeth hoping that nothing was going to break, there are 206 bones in the human body, each one had to be positioned precisely, the shape of the vertebrae it changes as you go down the spine and one of the problems with this is, of course, that the vertebrae are not completely normal. scanning the mud from the bones and everything was an opportunity to make a complete record of the skeleton in case it fell apart during cleaning. We've never scanned a skeleton like this before and it's certainly different to think it could be royalty, but not everything was going to plan as Joe examined the skeleton some data was about to call everything into question there was a remote chance it could be a woman there are some features in the pelvis quite wider than we would normally expect to see in a male skeleton the skeleton of

richard

the third was beginning to reveal its secrets ct scans were already being used by dr.

Caroline Wilkinson at the University of Dundee to reconstruct her face. This model was made by putting all the layers of the CT scans together and forming a 3D model. The process we use for reconstruction and representation is anatomical, so what it should give us is a scientific basis. Assessing the face of this skull rather than the artistic representation in the portrait (a well-known painting of Richard survives), it would be interesting to see if the reconstructed face looked like it, but Caroline's technique was based on scientific data on the thickness of the muscles and the distance between them.

In the skin and the skull we have a set of tissue depth measurements that are taken from white European men, in this case between 30 and 40 years old, so we get a lot of little virtual pegs that give us a kind of contour map within which we can work to produce the rendering and basically slowly build up the face from the skull to the muscular structure in Leicester with the full CT scans, the skeleton could finally be carefully cleaned, then Joe began his analysis. I will carry out a more detailed assessment of the age of the skeleton I will record it in more detail but characteristics that allow us to determine the sex although you can see that by observing it in the field I will also take a series of measurements Joe's measurements revealed that this individual would have measured five feet eight inches tall and died sometime between his 20s and 30s.

Richard was 32 years old and died, but most intriguing of all was the spinal deformity to define and classify the distinctive curve of the spine that the team called dr. Piers Mitchell, the leading expert on spinal deformities. Scoliosis is a three-dimensional twisting of the spine that gives it the appearance of an S-shaped curve. When we look at the skeleton, we can see that this individual had a very different scoliosis by taking measurements from the spine. The photographs when he was on the ground show that the curve was between sixty and eighty degrees, which is a pretty big curve.

Piers was joined by Joe and Philippa Langley from the Richard the Third Society to cast his expert eye on the bones. We have the skeleton here. presented and we've reproduced the curve as best we can just to show you a little bit about some of the bones that we have here in this vertebra. You can see how the bone forms in the ligaments that connect this vertebra. with the one above showing that the curve would have been quite rigid, incredibly Piers was able to realize that this scoliosis was not present at birth. By looking at Richards' bones, we could see that they all have a more or less normal shape, so he did not have congenital scoliosis.

We now know that his scoliosis started before he finished growing because we can actually see subtle changes in the bones where they follow the line of the curve, so they take on a subtle wedge shape, so it's likely that his scoliosis started in sometime between 10 years old. and around 13, when most boys begin to go through pubertal growth internally, the effect was striking. The external effect can be seen in this photograph of a modern patient with the proviso that scoliosis would have affected Richards' height: he would have been shorter than the initial one. Estimated at five feet eight inches, scoliosis could also have put immense pressure on his heart and lungs and may have caused severe pain that is the kind of Shakespearean myth if he had had a withered arm or any kind of oddity in his arms if you compare the humerus on one side to the humerus on the other they are exactly the same length the same for the forearm they are symmetrical on both sides so there is no reason to think that one side was withered compared to the other one thing Joe and I What What I did notice was that the radius bones here are relatively grass-walk or female when we looked at the bones, especially his arm bones, there were no strong muscle attachment marks and the bones seemed quite thin, he must have been physically less stocky such time someone who is going to have robust and strong muscle markings on their bones there are also some features in the pelvis this this feature here the sciatic notches here are wider than we would normally expect to see on a male skeleton this is a feature that varies what you can have a female site Achmat and a female gender surprise in the lab were yes, the amount of ups and downs and I think probably the scariest was when Jeremy was initially looking at the skeleton and sent me an email saying he thought it could possibly be a female and I just couldn't believe that as a possibility it was almost like having to think about planning emigration at that stage, yet a historical text of the time suggested that Richard had a rather feminine physique for a teacher.

Lin foxhole explains that it is a very interesting description because using those particular words of light and weak body of strength now that the Latin word strength is really interesting VESA, the concept often carries connotations of masculinity, it is not a concept that is applied regularly . example for women, the delicate grass-hallway skeleton we have is something that perhaps even drives the descriptions we find in the texts for absolute proof of the sex of the skeleton, the DNA test had to show a male Y chromosome and confirm his identity, the team needed a DNA match to a living relative, finding that living relative would be critical.

It all depended on a type of DNA transmitted exclusively through the female line. Mitochondrial DNA, if there is anything left in terms of DNA coming out of Scalia's remains. We hope it is mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is in the egg, so a woman will pass it on to all her children, men and women, but only daughters will pass it on, so the search began for a descendant of Richard, the third family that shared this particular DNA. One man, the historian John Ashe, damn Hill, had set out to find one. He knew right away that it was going to be a difficult task.

John focused on the women's line. Richard, the mother of the third, Cecily Neville, had several sisters and I had to follow them. all of his lines were strangely promising until the 19th century, but suddenly I reached a stage where not everyone married or they married very late and had no children or they married very late and had only one child and it turned out to be a son. and all this huge amount of evidence suddenly disappeared. I finally found only one line that preserves this exclusively women's line to this day. That real relative turned out to be a woman named Joy Simpson who lived in Canada.

Joyce died but her son Michael inherited her mitochondrial DNA and we find him working as a cabinet maker in north London. If the skeleton's DNA matched Michaels, that was the proof the team needed that the skeleton was indeed Richard. Hello, I am looking for a nephew of Richard III. and I found it I think you found one of the last Plantagenet, well possibly, no, we had no idea until John Ashe contacted my mother in 2005. Tony Hill informed him that he had traced her as a female line descended from Anne of York, Richard. big sister all the specific DNA well the DNA as it is physically as part of who you are part of my physical being is directly related to Richard the third's family and that's it, it makes you stop and think and sometimes I find it a little overwhelming.

Research by Professor Kevin Surer, a genealogist at Lester University, confirmed that Michael was a 17-generation direct descendant of Richard. He was related through the important female line, but the line stops with Michael and his brothers when they died, the line dies with them, so the skeleton was unearthed just in time in Leicester, Michael met the geneticist of the project dr. Tori King, well what I have here is a saliva sample from Michael Ibsen that contains a lot of his DNA, it has a lot of cells from his cheeks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some of this and extract his DNA and then sequence your mitochondrial DNA and I'll compare it to any mitochondrial DNA we can get from your happy remains, as opposed to the skeleton.

Michaels' DNA took Cheree a matter of days to analyze. in sequence because it was in much better condition so this is essentially part of Michael's mitochondrial DNA sequence and this is actually my dad's and what you'll see is that not everyone has the same DNA sequence. You can see there is a difference between the two, so my dad here has a particular sequence and Michael has a slightly different one, this is how you can differentiate the mitochondrial DNA sequence from each other and what I will do is try to get the DNA sequence . of the same region in the skeletal remains and then we compare the two sequences and what we hope is to get a perfect match.

As the search for DNA intensified, the team was making surprising discoveries in the skeleton that revealed not only how Richard died, but the sequence of the wounds, the weapons that caused them, and his brutal, bloody final moments as he fought for his crown. and his life on the battlefield after the intended blow probably five months after breaking the asphalt the scientists were close to declaring that our skeleton was Richard the Third a medieval tomb in a sacred place a curved column the correct age of death had been found a living female lineage relative of Richard III and her DNA was being compared to the skeleton while another test was being carried out that would add an important piece to the puzzle Well, carbonation has been around since around the 1940s and is a scientific method for dating living organisms, Therefore, it is based on the fact that all living organisms absorb a certain amount of radioactive isotope called carbon-14 and that, when the organism dies, it disintegrates. known rate, meaning a date can be produced.

The technique involved taking a sample of the skeleton and isolating its constituent elements. ThisIt would reveal the age of the bones and give clues to the person's diet. Philippa John and I were there to get the result we were hoping for. it would be around the year of Richard's death 1485, we were hopeful that we would get there within 80 years, that was the thing to be able to eliminate any of these earlier medieval burials and the initial dates have come in your suggestions. 14, 30 to 60, which is a little early when we first received the dates and I saw a static opening paragraph that said fourteen thirty to sixty.

I thought I'd know it's a little early actually, but then, like you. Read further down the page, the radiocarbon specialist said that we had to apply a correction because this individual had a high marine diet, meaning he ate a lot of fish and this would have an effect on the dating process because the individual ate a lot. Marine fish by eating marine fish, marine fish are absorbing a lot of previous carbon-14 and it is distorting the day, so it remodels itself and then it gives us a 95.4% chance that it is between 1450 and 15 years from today . The interesting thing about this analysis is that it is confirmed. that Richard, one third, had a very high protein diet, a lot of meat and even more fish, which effectively shows us the high status he had because the population of medieval Leicester, according to the work we have done in many excavations in the city , shows that most people would have been eating porridge very rarely.

Could they have access to fresh meat and fish in Dundee? Caroline was making progress with facial reconstruction. Now I'm just adding a little bit of skin on top of the muscle structure with the added skin. She began to see a similarity, he sees himself as rich. The third one is actually a little scary because the fact that it looks so similar makes me doubt the objectivity of what we've done, which means I had to go back and check everything a million times. times to make sure this follows anatomical standards, which it does, and it will look very similar to the face we see in the portraits, which is cool.

The next stage was to make a full 3D model with skin and hair texture, it probably won't be as clear until we've added those textures because at this point it looks like a clay hand rather than a person. This is really nice, isn't it? The detail you can see here is fantastic. Another investigation was being carried out in Leicester, materials engineer Sarah Haynesworth and weapons expert Bob Woosnum Savage were comparing skeletal injuries with weapons that could have caused them in one direction. It looks a bit like a shovel. Yes, definitely, the leaf that crosses. This is really interesting.

This injury here on the top of the head, we clearly have. we still have bone in the space between the two parts of the skull, it is enough to break the skull but not pierce it and push that bone plug out of the way. When we analyzed the skeleton, we were able to identify several injuries. Interestingly, none of them showed signs of healing, so we know they all occurred around the time of death. Joe Appleby, forensic pathologist Stewart Hamilton and Arm Rabab Widness Savage identified a pattern to the fatal blows. We found a series of injuries on the skeleton, he tells us the moments before his death and immediately after you can see that there is a small cut here and we think that what happened there is that perhaps someone has carried out a cutting action acting with a weapon. sharp blade. it just cut off the top of his head because the blade was kind of a depression and the serrations were still there because the blade went in and Bob believed that this injury was probably caused by a sword, not a blunt and cumbersome weapon, but a piece of advanced military technology.

In reality, these were state-of-the-art weapons at that time and this excellent medieval sword is actually nothing more than a precision instrument, a killing machine or the same, but it is perfectly balanced to do its job, that is this point of balance and that means this. The sword can be used with great speed, great grace, great dexterity, but it's there to kill someone, so we also have this much more noticeable but still quite small wound, it's a penetrating wound of some kind, you can see, just There is a very small entry wound. on the top of the skull, the penetrating wound on the top of the head was probably caused by something like this, this is known as a rondell dagger, the blade, as you can see, is actually for four-sided needles, a needle very strong and is designed exclusively for piercing and you find illustrations from the late 15th century showing people holding a dagger like this over a professional and the victim, who are standing on his head and pushing down on the top knob, that's what I think I would have achieved that. wound on the top of the head and then of course we get to the most obvious wound on the skull which is this very important cut that has been removed and we actually have some of the bone cut that has been removed. here is a very very dramatic injury again you are talking about a lot of force behind something to cut this girl like this certainly if you look at where this injury is the brain would be visible through that we all know how vascular it is the scalp.

Do we know how many blood vessels there are, you just hit your head and how much it bleeds? There are areas where pieces of scalp will be cut away for the skull, so there will be a lot of blood coming from those injuries. visible brain you get away from something that I don't even know about today with modern neurosurgery, so I think that's the knock, which probably this is a Halpert, this is basically an ax blade, as you can see now, these would have been sharp , these edges and What is interesting about the use of the halberd is that this appears to coincide with the catastrophic trauma to the back of the skull, where it was cut.

I think this is I think this is the murder weapon so there's a final wound on the skeleton and again we're very sure that this is something that happened after Richard's death and that's in the pelvis there's actually a line that crosses here and we can see that something entered from your back, penetrated slightly towards the front, so what? What we believe is that someone stabbed him with some type of knife in the buttocks, in the back. Minton, in total there were 10 identifiable wounds, a small puncture wound to the top of the skull, three more glancing blows, a dagger to the cheekbone. a cut to the jaw two fatal wounds to the base of the skull a blade cut to the ribs and a brutal humiliation wound probably administered after death he may have suffered countless additional injuries that left no mark on his skeleton the combination of the curvature of the spine and the pattern of injuries is not only the single injury that caused death, but the pattern of injuries very strongly suggests that it is him.

Overall, we have a number of things that are pretty unlikely in themselves and they've all come together and the chances of that happening and it not being him are actually relatively small. A final test was needed. A DNA match with the media gathered for the announcement. The jury gave us the answer. I don't really know what DNA result it is, so if you look. Michael's DNA and you look at the DNA from the skeletal remains there is a match looking at the sequences the match was identical Richard and Michael share one of the rarest types of mitochondrial DNA called haplotype j1c to see that only one or two percent of people carry it the population, this made the match even more reliable when I started to see the first sequences come back and seeing that it was an action I became very quiet, it was fine with them.

Sheree also revealed that she had managed to isolate a Y chromosome, proving that the skeleton was male, what was so exciting at the time we were told this was that it meant we could actually say beyond reasonable doubt that we had found Richard 2/3, while without DNA it might have been something like the balance of probabilities as written 2/3 to bolster genealogical research. Kevin Shura and Tory King obtained a DNA sample from another woman and a relative of Richard. The third also matched and now I can tell you that there is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants. of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains that we found in the excavation of the gray fires.

Richard's skeleton is now undergoing further scientific testing to tell us more about his life. Jerry King is analyzing his DNA in greater detail by investigating his Y chromosome to prove it. the male ancestry line and the search for evidence of hereditary disease the skeleton has more secrets to reveal it has been incredibly surreal it makes me think that the time was right and you know, it makes me think that it was meant to be this was a very long shot and None of us expected to find a dead king. I mean, how often do archaeologists do this?

The facial reconstruction bears a striking resemblance to the portrait of Richard the Third's face. For everyone involved, it has been an incredible journey after all, it doesn't come very often. You come across the remains of a king in a parking lot.