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Monday, February 17, 2014

King Richard III's remains to be sequenced for DNA

Laurence Olivier as Richard III in the Criterion release of the 1955 film classic.
The earliest surviving portrait of Richard (c. 1520, after a lost original), formerly belonging to the Paston family. Source: Society of Antiquaries, London
Steven Erglanger reporting in the New York Times: "About a year and a half after finding King Richard III’s corpse under a parking lot in Leicester, British scientists will proceed to grind up some of his bones to try to sequence his genetic code. They hope to discover his hair and eye color and see what kind of infectious bacteria he might have been hosting. They have already confirmed that the last Plantagenet king was indeed a hunchback, that he was infected with roundworm and that he died from the blow of a sharp instrument, like a sword or halberd, to the head."

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