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Forensic Sleuths Sketch Richard III’s Brutal End

Forensic Sleuths Sketch Richard III’s Brutal End

Paris (AFP) — King Richard III likely perished at the hands of assailants who hacked away pieces of his scalp and rammed spikes or swords into his brain as the helmet-less monarch knelt in the mud.

So suggests a report, published Wednesday, that in dry forensic prose exposes the horrific demise of one of English history’s most controversial monarchs.

It backs anecdotal evidence, made famous by Shakespeare, that Richard was unhorsed before he met his doom.

Bringing together 21st-century science and sketchy knowledge of 15th-century history, the analysis provides a chilling tableau of the brutality of warfare in late medieval England.

Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, central England, on August 22, 1485.

The monarch’s death was the culmination of a three-decade war for the throne, bringing the curtain down on the three-century dynasty of his Plantagenet clan, and ushering in the Tudors.

“The most likely injuries to have caused the king’s death are the two to the inferior aspect (lower part) of the skull — a large sharp-force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon,” said Guy Rutty, a pathologist at the University of Leicester.

A halberd was a medieval battle ax with spiked point, and a bill was a hooked-tip blade on the end of a pole.

– No horse –

“Richard’s head injuries are consistent with some near-contemporary accounts of the battle, which suggest that Richard abandoned his horse after it became stuck in a mire and was killed while fighting his enemies,” said Rutty.

The study, published in The Lancet medical journal, used X-ray computed tomography (CT) for a microscopic analysis of a skeleton found in 2012 under a car park at a former church.

After being lost for five centuries, researchers identified the remains as Richard’s, backed by DNA analysis and radiocarbon-dating.

The new paper documents nine injuries to the head at or shortly before death, and two to the torso that were likely inflicted post-mortem.

The two blows that probably killed the king likely came from a sword or spike driven into the brain at the base of the skull.

They are consistent with the victim having been “in a prone position or on its knees with the head pointing downwards,” the study’s authors wrote.

Non-fatal injuries included three cuts to the top of the skull that would have sliced off much of the scalp. A knife or dagger was stuck right through his face, from right cheek to left.

“Richard’s injuries represent a sustained attack or an attack by several assailants,” said Sarah Hainsworth, a professor of materials engineering at the university.

“The wounds to the skull indicate that he was not wearing a helmet, and the absence of defensive wounds on his arms and hands indicate that he was otherwise still armored at the time of his death.”

Assuming that he had been wearing his royal armor, two injuries to the trunk must have been inflicted after Richard’s body was stripped, the team said.

One was a blow to the right tenth rib with what was probably a fine-edged dagger.

The other was a thrust, probably by a sword driven upwards through the right buttock that would have penetrated his bowels and other soft pelvic organs — a blow that would have caused fatal bleeding had he been alive.

– Contemporary accounts –

Without any soft tissue to analyze, the scientists looked at sometimes tiny marks left on the bones — cuts, abrasions, punctures, and so on — and compared them with the known impacts caused by the weapons of the time.

The gory reconstruction of his death is heavily dependent on assumptions about the wearing of armor and the loss of helmet, but chimes with several contemporary accounts.

One version of events penned the year after Richard’s death, said his naked body was slung over his horse like a saddlebag and brought to Leicester.

“Insults” were directed at the corpse by the crowds — which could be when an onlooker inflicted the pelvic wound by thrusting a blade through the king’s buttock, according to the new investigation.

Further mutilation of his corpse would have been stopped — to display his dead body as a trophy, the defeated king had to be recognizable.

Richard died aged 32 after only two years on the throne. Contemporary accounts described him as generous and a good monarch, but his reputation was blackened by the victorious Tudors.

In Shakespeare’s play Richard III, the king’s spinal curvature was transformed into a hunchback, and his character was murderous and hungry for power.

AFP Photo

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Gargantuan New Dinosaur Uncovered

Gargantuan New Dinosaur Uncovered

By Tom Avril, The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — It weighed as much as eight school buses.

Its neck looked like a section of oil pipeline. Its thigh bone alone was as big as a grown man.

Say hello to Dreadnoughtus schrani.

Drexel University scientists announced Thursday they had unearthed the heaviest known dinosaur for which a weight can be accurately calculated.

In many cases, the fossils of giant dinosaurs are largely incomplete, preventing scientists from making good estimates about their size, movement, and other characteristics. This one, found in southern Patagonia in Argentina, was unusually well preserved, with the scientists able to recover close to half of its 250-odd bones.

By measuring the circumference of the thigh bone and upper arm bone, the researchers calculated that this beast weighed more than 65 tons. And it was not done growing, as evidenced by shoulder bones that had yet to fuse together, said team leader Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor of paleontology and geology at Drexel.

Lacovara named the animal after the dreadnought class of battleships from the early 20th century, so nicknamed because they feared nothing — dreaded naught. This dinosaur was so big that few predators would have dared to attack it, Lacovara said. But if one of them did, the dinosaur could have responded with a smack of its muscular, 29-foot tail.

“It essentially had a weaponized tail,” Lacovara said.

The “schrani” portion of the name is a tribute to Philadelphia tech entrepreneur Adam Schran, who helped fund the research.

The new find will contribute to scientists’ understanding of how the biggest land animals moved, and how they could sustain themselves — likely by gorging on tens of thousands of calories’ worth of leaves and plant matter every day, Lacovara said.

Photo via WikiCommons

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Earthquake Cluster Likely To Strike San Francisco Bay Area, Scientists Say

Earthquake Cluster Likely To Strike San Francisco Bay Area, Scientists Say

By Becky Bach, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Bay Area’s Big One will still be plenty big, but it might not be just one, according to a study released Monday by U.S. Geological Survey scientists.

A flurry of midsized quakes is more likely to strike the San Francsico Bay Area rather than a giant 1906-esque rupture, said David Schwartz, a paleoseismologist at the USGS’s Menlo Park office and the lead author of the study, which appeared in June’s Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. The study marks the first comprehensive history of the Bay Area’s seismicity dating to 1600.

A quake cluster isn’t necessarily good news, as it could keep communities constantly cleaning up the earthquake damage, several experts said.

“It presents a very different problem in how you respond and recover from earthquakes,” Schwartz said.

After the 7.8-magnitude 1906 earthquake, the 20th century was abnormally stable, he said. Therefore, an earthquake cluster is overdue, the scientists said.

“Basically, what goes in, must go out,” Schwartz said. The region’s seismicity stems from the clash of two massive plates in the earth’s crust. The Pacific Plate is sliding northwest, while the North American Plate is moving southeast.

Since 1906, the plates have moved about 13 feet in the Bay Area. Like a compressed spring, they’re ready to burst.

In the Bay Area, the plate boundary fractures into a handful of fissures, all generally trending northwest-to-southeast. The well-known San Andreas Fault, which Schwartz calls the “master fault,” is accompanied by the San Gregorio Fault, the Hayward Fault, the Calaveras Fault and the Rodgers Creek Fault in the North Bay, among others.

Future quakes are expected to spread out along these faults.

“These faults are being stressed by the plate movements … and they all have to catch up,” Schwartz said.

The various faults “talk” to each other, said Roland Burgmann, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “The communicating family of faults sometimes tend to rupture together as a group or shut each other off.”

The 1906 earthquake was likely a fluke, the perfect alignment of conditions that allowed 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault — from northern Mendocino County to San Juan Bautista — to release its pent-up pressure. This massive shaking kept the area unusually calm for a century, Schwartz said.

“Eventually, there should be more clusters,” Burgmann said.

The scientists based their prediction on the historical record, which shows a cluster of quakes shook the Bay Area from 1690 to 1776. At least six earthquakes, ranging from 6.3 to 7.7 magnitude, rattled the region’s major faults during that period, Schwartz said.

The cumulative release of energy from the quakes roughly equals that of the 1906 earthquake, Schwartz said.

“This is a summary of a tremendous amount of work,” said Greg Beroza, a Stanford seismologist who was not involved with the study.

Previously, other scientists had scoured the records kept by the Franciscan missionaries at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores starting in 1776, Schwartz said. He called the Spanish missionaries “the first seismographers.” They described the rumblings in their records, allowing scientists to assess the earthquake’s strength by extrapolating from the amount of damage the Franciscans described.

Scientists dated the earlier quakes by digging trenches and calculating the age of charcoal or other organic materials found several feet below the surface, Schwartz said.

This technique misses small or deep earthquakes, which don’t break the surface.

Although the scientists predict a group of tremors, rather than just a single, large earthquake, they admit the future could surprise them. The Bay Area has a 63 percent chance of one of more large earthquakes before 2036, according to estimates released in 2008 by the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities, a coalition of state, federal and academic geologists.

The USGS study provides a useful framework to plan for the future, said Thorne Lay, an earth scientist at UC Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.

Schwartz said he hopes to look back even farther than 1600 to more fully understand the Bay Area’s seismic history — and its future.

“The key question is when are we going to come out of the shadow, when are we going to go back to normal?” Burgmann asked.

AFP Photo/Frederick Florin

Scientists Identify Oldest Crystal On Earth — 4.4 Billion Years Old

Scientists Identify Oldest Crystal On Earth — 4.4 Billion Years Old

By Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times

The oldest known material on Earth is a tiny bit of zircon crystal that has remained intact for an incredible 4.4 billion years, a study confirms.

The ancient remnant of the early Earth may change the way we think about how our planet first formed.

The crystal is the size of a small grain of sand, just barely visible to the human eye. It was discovered on a remote sheep farm in western Australia, which happens to sit on one of the most stable parts of our planet.

“The Earth’s tectonic processes are constantly destroying rocks,” said John Valley, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who discovered and dated the crystal. “This may be the one place where the oldest material has been preserved.”

The crystal is so much older than anyone expected that Valley and his team have had to date it twice. They published their first paper about this grain of zircon in 2001. At that time they determined it was 4.4 billion years old by measuring how many of the uranium atoms in the rock had decayed into lead.

Geologists have used this technique, known as the uranium lead system, for decades to date rocks on Earth and from space, but because nobody had ever found anything on Earth that was this old, the initial findings were questioned. Maybe, some said, the lead atoms had moved around in the zircon, making it seem like there was more lead and giving the scientists an inaccurate date.

On Sunday, Valley and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Geoscience that proves the zircon is as old as they say. This time around, they used a new method called atom-probe tomography that let them see individual atoms of lead in the sample and see whether they had moved. They found that the lead atoms do indeed move around over time, but on such a small scale that the movement would not interfere with the overall dating process.

“We have a zircon that is 4.4 billion years old,” Valley said.

And now the fun begins, because this small piece of ancient rock has big implications for how and when the Earth’s crust started to form.

Like the rest of the solar system, scientists say, Earth formed about 4.567 billion years ago.

One theory suggests that in the frenzy of those early days 4.5 billion to 4.4 billion years ago, Earth was struck by an object the size of Mars. The impact altered Earth’s tilt and caused a chunk of the planet to vaporize into space; some of that dust later became the moon.

The blow also caused the rest of Earth to be covered in a hot magma ocean. This is called the Hadean period.

Scientists were not sure how long the Hadean period lasted, but this ancient piece of zircon suggests the Earth’s crust had started to cool and form by 4.4 billion years ago.

“What we can say is that 4.4 billion years ago, the continental crust had started for form,” Valley said, “and that the real Hadean period only lasted for a very short time. By 4.4 billion years, it was over.”

Photo: cobalt123 via Flickr