British researchers recently reported that a skeleton found toward the end of 2012 with a cleaved skull and a curved spine entombed under a car park was that of Richard III solving a 500-year-old mystery about the final resting place of the last English king to die in battle. Richard, depicted by William Shakespeare as a monstrous tyrant who murdered two princes in the Tower of London, was killed fighting his eventual successor Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field in central England in 1485.
A team of archaeologists and historians from the University of Leicester said evidence showed that a skeleton found last year during excavations of a medieval friary under a parking lot in the city was indeed that of Richard. It’s the academic conclusion of the University of Leicester that beyond reasonable doubt the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September 2012 is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England,” Buckley said. The skeleton showed signs of injuries consistent with wounds received in battle; a bladed implement appeared to have cleaved part of the rear of the skull while a barbed metal arrowhead was found between vertebrae of the skeleton’s upper back. However the most interesting discovered is that the remains also displayed signs of scoliosis, which is a form of spinal curvature, consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard’s appearance, which seems to provide the foundations for Shakespeare’s description of him as “deform’d, unfinished,” hunchback.