Remains found under a British parking lot are definitely those of King Richard III, conclude scientists who've conducted an intense round of forensic genetic studies.
Killed in a battle in 1485 and later immortalized by Shakespeare, Richard was buried under a church long since demolished, and when researchers went looking for the church's ancient foundations and, it was assumed, his final resting place, they discovered it was now under a modern-day parking lot.
The researchers exhumed a skeleton that, based on its age, wounds from weapons and signs of scoliosis -- a bent spine that may have begun the legend of Shakespeare's "hunchback king -- they tentatively identified as belonging to the king.
Only DNA might remove any doubt, so researchers recovered genetic material from the skeleton then tracked down living descendants of the king to analyze their genetic makeups, scanning lines of inheritance to determine if the centuries-old skeleton had a place in the family tree.
All the signs -- the DNA, the scoliosis, the date and location correlating with the known history of the battle in which Richard was killed -- points to just one chance in 100,000 that the bones would belong to anyone else, says geneticist Turi King of the University of Leicester.
"If you put all the data together, the evidence is overwhelming that these are the remains of Richard III," she says.
One surprising result of the genetic research was evidence of infidelity in the family tree, a finding that could cast doubt on Richard's claim to the throne.
The evidence is in the fact that DNA passed down on the maternal side matches that of living descendants while genetic information passed down on the male side does not, raising the possibility of "false paternity" somewhere in the generations either before or after Richard, researchers said.
That wasn't unexpected, the researchers said, since previous studies have shown female infidelity, or cuckolding, occurred at a rate of one to two percent every generation.
It could have happened anywhere in the generations separating Richard III from his living descendants, they said, or indeed before Richard's birth.
"We may have solved one historical puzzle, but in so doing, we opened up a whole new one," says Kevin Schurer, a genealogy expert who took part in the DNA research.
Richard III was the last king of the House of York, killed at the 1485 Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor, marking the end of the Plantagenet dynasty of English rulers and the rise of the Tudor dynasty.
