Richard III’s Remains Found Six Feet Under British Parking Lot

It’s hardly the kind of vaunted resting place various other British royals have enjoyed after serving their earthly tenures, but the earth beneath a municipal parking lot in Leicester, England, is where the remains of Britain’s legendary King Richard III were recently discovered.

The bones of the contentious 15th century figure, whom William Shakespeare described as a physically “deformed, unfinish’d” and generally nasty piece of work, were discovered in September by a team from the University of Leicester and subsequently identified.

Meanwhile, a mock-up of what the maligned monarch might have looked like has been made since the archeological breakthrough — check it out here.

The New York Times:

The geneticist Turi King told a news conference held by the University of Leicester research team that DNA samples taken from two modern-day descendants of Richard III’s family matched those from the bones found at the site. One of the descendants, Michael Ibsen, is the son of a 16th-generation niece of King Richard’s. The second wished to remain anonymous, the researchers said.

The skeleton, moreover, had a gaping hole in the skull consistent with contemporary accounts of the battlefield blow that killed the monarch more than 500 years ago.

Before the DNA findings came in, Mr. Taylor and other team members said, the university team had assembled a mounting catalog of evidence that pointed conclusively at the remains being those of the king. These included confirmation that the body was that of a man in his late 20s or early 30s, and that his high-protein diet had been rich in meat and fish, characteristic of a privileged life in the 15th century.

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–Posted by Kasia Anderson.