2014/12/04

Fox News December 3, 2014: England's King Richard III identified with DNA

Scientists say there is "overwhelming evidence" that a skeleton found under a parking lot is that of England's King Richard III, but their DNA testing also has raised questions about the nobility of some of his royal successors.

The bones of the 15th-century king were dug up in the city of Leicester in 2012, and experts have published initial data suggesting they belong to Richard, including an analysis of his curved spine and the injuries that killed him.

In the new study — probably the oldest forensic case ever solved — scientists compared DNA from the skeleton to living relatives and analyzed DNA data identifying eye and hair color, which they matched to the earliest known portrait of the king.

"Richard can be likened to a missing person's case," said Turi King, a geneticist at the University of Leicester who led the research. "The probability that this is Richard is 99.999 percent," she said. When King and colleagues compared the skeleton's DNA obtained from the ground-up powder of one tooth and a leg bone to samples provided by a 14th cousin on Richard's maternal side, they found a perfect match. more appledaily ettoday ltn yahoo