It's a 500-year-old missing person case and researchers say it has now been solved, definitively.

The missing person was King Richard III, the controversial English monarch, described as having one shoulder higher than another. He ascended to the throne in 1483 and died in battle just two years later in August 1485 at the age of 32.

A sprawling research team of archaeologists, historians, engineers and scientists was fairly confident that the twisted skeleton discovered in 2012 beneath a Leicester parking lot where a friary once stood belonged to the king. But now they say they can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, scientists report that mitochondrial DNA obtained from the skeleton was a perfect match with one of King Richard's living relatives, and a near-perfect match with a second relative. "The important thing to note is that the mtDNA type is rare," said Erika Hagelberg, who studies ancient DNA at the University of Oslo, and who was not involved in the study. "This makes the match much more significant."

Deforestation in Amazon drops

Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest dropped 18 percent over the past 12 months, falling to the second-lowest level in a quarter century, Brazil's environment minister said. Izabella Teixeira said 1,870 square miles of rain forest were destroyed between August 2013 and July 2014. That's a bit larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The figures were down from 2,275 square miles razed during the same period a year earlier, in the wake of the adoption of a controversial bill revising the Forest Code.

Are gray seals killing porpoises?

Turns out those adorable gray seals aren't so cuddly after all. Findings described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveal a disturbing trend that could potentially alter the ecology of harbor porpoises.

Harbor porpoises, formally known as Phocoena phocoena, have been washing up along the coasts of the southern North Sea in Europe, with deadly wounds whose origins were a mystery. A disturbing explanation came to light when DNA from gray seals (known as Halichoerus grypus) was discovered in bite wounds on mutilated porpoises.

"If dead stranded and autopsied harbor porpoises are representative of porpoise deaths in the region, then gray seal attacks (more than 17 percent) together with fisheries bycatch (approximately 20 percent), infectious disease (approximately 18 percent) and emaciation (approximately 14 percent) are the most important causes of death for harbor porpoises in the southeastern North Sea," the study authors wrote.

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