14 DAY TRIAL // Great Britain is about to open a new museum in Leicester, the place where the bones of Richard III were discovered. Ideally, the remains themselves would be put on display, but they aren't exactly exhibit-worthy after such a long time. The remains weren't mummified after all, unlike Egyptian mummies. And those are usually shut tight inside sarcophagi anyway.
Nevertheless, the new museum wants to put the bones on display, as morbid as it sounds. And if it can't get the actual bones out there for every visitor to see, the officials have to settle for the next best thing.
Which brings us to the matter at hand: the entire skeleton of Richard 3D has been 3D printed out of white plastic. It makes the whole thing look a lot more pristine than the real skeleton.
Not that it's hard for something to be cleaner than a pile of bones that were buried in dirt for 500 years. However, there's another facet to this: the 3D printed bones look cleaner and brighter than the man himself was ever described in history and literature.
William Shakespeare himself has few good things to say about King Richard III, describing him as a murderous tyrant. It's oddly fitting that he was a hunchback. Although the fact that, for all his sadism, he was a frail man is quite ironic.
Richard III was also the last English King who died in battle, and did so at a fairly young age (although perhaps not so much according to the standards of the time).
The 3D printed replica of the skeleton will show the deformities of the spine (severe scoliosis), as well as various other wounds that his bones suffered over the course of his reign. A slice was taken out of the skull at one point, for example, and there are traces of an abdominal wound, and even a pelvic wound (which looks like it was gained from having a sword shoved up the backside, interestingly enough).
The replica bones are expected to be seen by 100,000 visitors during the first year of the new museum's existence alone. The 3D scanning and printing process took a fair bit of time, but was completed back in June. As for the real bones, they will be sealed in a tom at Leicester Cathedral within the next 12 months.
That would mean that the remains will have spent about three years exhumed and being scanned since their discovery two years ago in a city council car park where the Grey Friars church had once stood.
