LONDON (Reuters Life!) — The skeletal remains of one of the earliest members of the English royal family may have been found in a German Cathedral, researchers said.

A team of German and British researchers are attempting to establish whether the silk-wrapped bones found two-years ago in a lead coffin in Magdeburg Cathedral belong to Eadgyth, sister of England's first king and the ancestor of European royalty.

Bristol University professor and team-member Mark Horton told Reuters that tests on the bones had been positive so far in efforts to establish that they belonged to the sister of King Athelstan, who is credited with uniting Britain's Celtic and Saxon kingdoms in the tenth century.

"All the evidence suggests that they are her. We've done a whole batch of scientific work. The bones are of a young woman of the right age and so forth," Horton said.

Although the tomb of Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, survives in the southern English county of Wiltshire, it is most likely empty. That would make the discovery of Eadgyth's remains the oldest surviving of any English royal.

Historians say Eadgyth, thought to be born in 910 AD, was sent along with her sister Adiva to Saxony, so its ruler — the first Holy Roman Emperor Otto I — could decide which of the sisters he wanted to marry. He chose to make Eadgyth his queen.

"She was the Princess Diana of her day," Horton said.

Eadgyth (roughly pronounced Edith) bore Otto at least two children before her death in 946, aged 36. The descendants of Otto and Eadgyth ruled Germany until 1254.

"Her brother Athelstan was the first king of a unified England, her husband became the first Holy Roman Emperor and her blood runs in the veins of every royal family in Europe," Horton told Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Bristol University hopes to prove her identity by testing particles called isotopes in the bones to establish that they had come from Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom once ruled by Eadgyth and Athelstan's grandfather Alfred the Great and which covered parts of what is now modern-day southern Britain.

The remains were found in a tomb bearing Eadgyth's name. If the researchers can prove that they are of the right age and background, then together with the marked tomb, this would point to a successful identification.

Harald Meller of the Landesmuseum fur Vorgeschichte in Germany, who led the project, said that part of the problem with identifying the remains was that they had been moved.

"We are still not completely certain that this is Eadgyth, although all the scientific evidence points to this interpretation," Meller said in a statement on Bristol University's website. "In the Middle Ages bones were moved around as relics and this makes identification difficult."

Horton said that they had also not recovered a complete skull but a fragment of the lower jaw. This would prevent the team from re-constructing an image of Eadgyth.

He said that fragments of the remains will be sent to Britain for "non-invasive" testing and that researchers were aiming to be able to formally identify Eadgyth by summer.

Then the bones will be reinterred in Magdeburg Cathedral.