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## The 2013 Announcement
The University of Leicester held a press conference on February 4, 2013, to announce its findings. The event, which was organized as a formal academic presentation before a substantial media presence, lasted roughly 40 minutes. Richard Buckley and the archaeology team presented the excavation findings. Jo Appleby presented the skeletal analysis. Kevin Schürer presented the genealogical research. Turi King presented the DNA results.
The conclusion, stated by the university’s vice-chancellor, was that the evidence established “beyond reasonable doubt” that the skeleton found under the car park on the Greyfriars site was Richard III.
The announcement generated enormous media coverage. The image of a medieval king’s bones being found under a municipal car park was a story that combined historical romance with contemporary incongruity in an irresistible way. The coverage was largely enthusiastic; the more careful academic qualifications were sometimes lost in the translation to newspaper headlines and broadcast reports.
Some historians pushed back on aspects of the identification even in the period immediately following the announcement. Michael Hicks, a historian of medieval England, argued in early 2013 that the mitochondrial DNA evidence alone could theoretically be satisfied by any male who shared the same maternal ancestor as Richard III, and that the identification was therefore less certain than the university’s language implied. This critique was partly addressed by the fact that the identification did not rest on mitochondrial DNA alone but on the convergence of multiple independent lines of evidence — though the strength of that convergence, and the appropriate degree of confidence, remained subjects of academic discussion.