Birds’ evolution on the march

RICHARD the Third, according to Shakespeare, was “not shaped for courtly tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass”.

“Rudely stamped” and “cheated of feature”, he was “sent unformed unfinished ... before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up.. that dogs do bark at me”.

Did the king, accused of murdering his young nephews in the Tower, suffer from curvature of the spine or was this an invention of Henry Tudor who defeated him on Bosworth Field (‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’)? Richard’s burial place was said to be a Leicester church, the site of which is now a car park. A skeleton unearthed there last year has a severely deformed spine and marks of violence. Carbon dating showed that it’s about 500 years old. In the ultimate “who do you think you are” piece of detective work, the skeleton’s DNA was compared with that of a living descendent of the king’s sister, Anne of York. The remains, it turns out, are indeed those of the notorious monarch and so Shakespeare’s account of his appearance rings true. How extraordinary that people separated by 17 generations, spanning half a millennium, are now shown, definitively, to be related.