A piece of an ancient pelvis bone that had been tucked away in museum storage might belong to the English King Alfred the Great or his son Edward, scholars announced Friday (Jan. 17).

Archaeologists had mounted a search to find the lost remains of Alfred the Great, who was king of Wessex and dominated England from 871 until his death in 899. Last year, researchers exhumed an unmarked grave at Saint Bartholomew's Church in Winchester, England, but none of the bodies buried there were a match with Alfred.

After that initial disappointment, the group then turned to bones in storage boxes at the Winchester City Museum that had been excavated from a nearby monastery, Hyde Abbey, in the 1990s. There, they found a promising fragment of a pelvis bone....