King Richard III’s remains continue to reveal new information about the British monarch two years after they were discovered in a Leicester parking lot.

King Richard III Remains sFOUND

The team that exhumed the remains in 2012 is more confident than ever, thanks to additional DNA testing, that they belong to King Richard III, the last English monarch to die on a battlefield, in 1485.  “If you put all the data together, the evidence is overwhelming that these are the remains of Richard III,” said Dr. Turi King from Leicester University, who led the study. “Richard can be likened to a missing person’s case. The probability that this is Richard is 99.999 percent.”

Additionally, scientists discovered evidence that Richard, who suffered from scoliosis, had blue eyes and was born with blond hair that may have darkened with age.

Initially there were skeptics that questioned whether or not the remains truly belonged to Richard III, as there was no a male-line genetic match found in the DNA. However, the maternal line of DNA found in the remains is incredibly rare and found in two living descendants. As for the paternal line, researchers say it points to an infidelity on the part of a wife somewhere in the Plantagenet family’s history.

“We may have solved one historical puzzle, but in so doing, we opened up a whole new one,” Professor Kevin Schurer, a genealogy specialist, told BBC News.

Professor Martin Richards, a population geneticist at the University of Huddersfield, weighed in, “The lack of any match for the Y-chromosome lineage is quite curious and suggests an intriguing new avenue for dynastic DNA studies.”

 

 

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