You wait centuries for the discovery of a royal body … and then two come along at once. A year after the remains of Richard III turned up under a car park in Leicester, archaeologists have found a piece of a pelvis that could belong to Alfred the Great. Experts are sure the fragment, excavated from the grounds of Hyde Abbey in Winchester, came from Alfred or his son Edward the Elder. It has been kept in a box in a storeroom at Winchester City Museum since 1999, but only now have historians realised its importance.
Dr. Katie Tucker, researcher at the University of Winchester, said that it might be possible to extract DNA from the pelvic bone but said the problem was finding another DNA source to check it with. She explained that it would theoretically be possible to check against a living ancestor, as had been done with Richard III, but the problem was identifying a definite descendant. Read more in the Daily Mail at this link.