This Looking for Richard quiz concentrates on finding the skeleton.
Following his death at the Battle of Bosworth, Richard III's body was taken to Leicester, where it was buried in the Franciscan Friary of Greyfriars. In 1538, when Henry VIII dissolved Greyfriars, Richard's body was said to have been cast into the River Soar and his coffin used as a trough for animals to drink from, but this story turned out to be false. The site of Greyfriars was sold and, over time, built upon. Until recently it was a car park and the once great king of England lay beneath the wheels of vehicles, rather than the grand tomb more befitting of a past monarch.
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The project went ahead after an appeal led to the donation of £13,000 in only two weeks by members of the public and Richard III appreciation groups
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After the ground was surveyed by radar the team chose to dig two trenches in the car park and possibly one more in a nearby playground. The choice of sites was based on land available for digging as much as on the likelihood of finding Richard's grave
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On the very first day of excavations, two parallel human leg bones were found buried 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) deep. The bones were covered in order to preserve them while the dig continued elsewhere in the trench
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The body of Richard III was said to have been buried in a part of the church known as the Choir. These were to be found in the eastern part of churches, exactly where the bones were discovered
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The team hoped to narrow their search by digging up only the bodies of men of a similar age to Richard and buried inside the church. Disfigurements and causes of death cannot be ascertained until after the bodies are exhumed, and Richard's height was unknown
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The feet were missing due to 19th century building work. The position of the hands suggested that they were tied when the body was buried and there was neither a coffin nor a shroud. It seemed that the body was put in a grave too small for it to be laid out properly and that the burial had been rushed
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Whoever the body belonged to had suffered from scoliosis of the spine, in which the vertebrae become curved. It is thought that Richard had been a sufferer of this condition, which was exaggerated by the Tudors who portrayed him as a hunchback
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Tests showed that the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, was the same in the exhumed skeleton and in Michael Ibsen. This shows that the two are related and makes it all but certain that the bones do in fact belong to Richard III
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The back of the skull had been removed by a strike from a sharp blade and another blade had entered the right side of the skull, passed through and hit the other side. There were also several non-lethal blows such as dagger wounds to the jaw and glancing blows to the head
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The actual line is, "Lladd y baedd, eilliodd ei ben," which translates from the Welsh as "Killed the boar, shaved his head." The boar is a reference to Richard's symbol on his coat of arms and "shaving his head" could refer to the wounds found on the body, which would have removed not only Richard's hair, but his scalp too
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