Pinned to the ground: Badly-fractured 700-year-old skeleton could be first ever casualty of giant medieval catapult

He was catapulted to fame 700 years later.A 14th-century skeleton with 167 fractures could be the first recorded casualty of a powerful medieval catapult known as a trebuchet.“It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity,” Jo Buckberry, a bioarchaeologist at the UK’s University of Bradford told Science Magazine.

“It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”She reportedly unveiled this so-called first ever instance of “trebuchet trauma” at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin.Dubbed Skeleton 150, the body was discovered alongside seven other casualties of war in Stirling Castle in 1997.Carbon dating revealed that five of them, including the skeleton in question, harked back to the 1300s, a tumultuous time period when Edward I, King of England, was trying to take control of the Kingdom of Scotland, Livescience reported.Better known as Edward Longshanks, the ambitious leader was perhaps best known for suppressing the uprising by Scottish hero William Wallace and ordering his execustion — a series of events immortalized in the 1995 Mel Gibson epic “Braveheart.While all the skeletons sported evidence of war wounds — including stab marks, impact from blunt instruments and more — only Skeleton 150 had this specific set of fractures.Closer analysis revealed that the victim’s skull had been smashed in 61 places and that he sustained a deep, zigzagging break to a shoulder, as well as nearly 60 bizarre, zigzagging rib fractures.This indicated that he was struck at a great speed and then “pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards,” according to anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who helped with this archaeological autopsy.However, the body’s extensive injuries and the shape and texture of the fractures eliminated the possibility that he took a header off the castle walls or was trampled by horses post-mortem.“The most similar cases I was finding we...