Richard III's bones

Astonishingly, scientists have compared the DNA of the battle-scarred, crook-backed skeleton unearthed in a Leicester car park near the site of the battle of Bosworth with that of a Canadian descendant of King Richard III and concluded that..yes...it's him:

Olivier as Richard III in wig and prosthetic nose, a famous make-up which he based jointly on an unpleasant Hollywood agent and Disney's Big Bad Wolf.

Anthony Sher as Richard III.

Al Pacino as Richard III.

Gandalf as Richard III.

Kenneth Brannagh as Richard III.

Kevin Spacey as Richard III.

pinhedz wrote:There's something suspicious about the placement of the vertabrae.

I don't see anything about the individual bones that would have dictated the pronounced curvature we see in the photo. They would have fit together just as well in a straight line.

It appears that Richard didn't have a 'hunchback' as such, but suffered from a medical ailment called 'scoliosis'.

A 14th century woman who suffered from scoliosis


Scoliosis (from Ancient Greek: σκολίωσις skoliosis "obliquity, bending") is a medical condition in which a person's spine is curved from side to side. Although it is a complex three-dimensional deformity, on an X-ray, viewed from the rear, the spine of an individual with scoliosis may look more like an "S" or a "C", rather than a straight line. Scoliosis is typically classified as either congenital (caused by vertebral anomalies present at birth), idiopathic (cause unknown, subclassified as infantile, juvenile, adolescent, or adult, according to when onset occurred), or neuromuscular (having developed as a secondary symptom of another condition, such as spina bifida, cerebral palsy, spinal muscular atrophy, or physical trauma). A lesser-known cause of scoliosis could be a condition called Chiari malformation.

Recent longitudinal studies reveal that the most common form of the condition, late-onset idiopathic scoliosis, is physiologically harmless and self-limiting. The rarer forms of scoliosis pose risks of complications.
(Wikipedia)