For a long time, paleontologists assumed that dinosaurs laid hard-shelled eggs in nests that they often buried to protect them from predators. But more recent evidence shows that dinosaur eggs varied as much as the animals themselves, and some were soft-shelled -although those often don't keep their shape long enough to fossilize. Parenting strategies varied from dino to dino as well.  

For example, consider the parrot-like dinosaurs called oviraptorids. Paleontologists have found the gorgeous skeletons preserved in a position where they seem to be sitting over nests of eggs. “It’s tempting to call this brooding, like living birds,” says San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Ashley Poust, “but we’re still unsure if that was part of their behavior.” Still, the details would indicate that the dinosaurs constructed their nests with care. Scientists know from previous finds that oviraptorids laid two eggs at a time in a clutch of 30 or more. “This means that the mother would have to stay with or at least return to the nest, lay her pair of eggs, arrange them carefully in the circle, and bury them appropriately every day for two weeks to a month,” Poust says.

Those eggs would have taken months to hatch. While experts are still searching for definitive evidence, parent dinosaurs may have sat with these nests until the hatchling babies pushed their way out of the shells. Also, Zelenitsky notes, researchers have found a large number of oviraptorosaur nests with adult dinosaur skeletons nearby. “These dinosaurs were completely obsessed with their eggs,” she says.

Each species had to balance the danger of staying with their nests against the odds of their young surviving without them, and developed different egg architecture, nests, and parenting strategies to maximize the chances of survival and successful reproduction, with varying results. Read how different dinosaurs dealth with their young, as far as we know now, at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Emőke Dénes)

The summer of 1817 was peculiar in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as that's when the sea serpent was spotted. But today it is an afterthought to those who serve the tourist trade in this seaside town. Unless the locals near Loch Ness or Area 51 or any other mysterious sighting in history, they just don't talk about the sea serpent that might have become the town's legacy.  

Most cryptid sightings are one‐on‐one occurrences: someone alone at night, on a backcountry road or in an isolated woods. Sometimes it’s a small group. Maybe there’s a fuzzy photograph, but soon enough the creature vanishes, never to return. But the Gloucester sea serpent was different. Scores of people saw it—people came from all over, gathered on the shore to gawk, and there it was.

Visible from shore or from a boat, exactly as expected. Different people on different days, all independently, all with more or less the same basic descriptions. No other cryptid in the long history of such beasts can boast such visibility—not Bigfoot, not Nessie.

Whatever it was, it was not a hoax or a hallucination. The Gloucester sea serpent faded from memory because the New England Linnaean Society got it wrong, creating a new species based on a snake plagued by rickets. When their error was exposed, the original sightings, it seems, were forgotten. But while Jacob Bigelow’s analysis of the rickety snake disproved the holotype specimen, Bigelow didn’t disprove the sightings themselves. The people who saw the sea serpent all agreed it was much bigger than a normal snake anyway.

The story of the Gloucester sea serpent is explained here, in which scientists erroneously declared it a new species and then were disproven. That let the wind out of the sails as far as the town of Gloucester was concerned. Yet other cryptids remain popular, including a couple that were thought to be legendary and then were found alive. Read about them and what makes a cryptid spark the public's imagination at LitHub. -via Digg

The Walking Dead season ten was abruptly truncated due to the coronavirus lockdown after 15 episodes. The last scheduled episode was put on pause. Now, during the virtual San Diego Comic Con, AMC's Walking Dead symposiums have revealed what the franchise has planned. First off, the episode we were missing will air on October 10. Watch the first few minutes of it here.

Note I did not say that The Walking Dead “finale” will air on October 4th, because — twist — it will no longer be the finale. At Comic-Con, Angela Kang also announced that, although production has not yet begun, the plan is to add an additional six episodes to season 10, which will air in 2021. It sounds like, instead of jumping to season 11 in its traditional February slot, the series will add additional season 10 episodes in the Spring and, presumably if all goes well, begin season 11 in the fall.

Following the singular Walking Dead episode on October 10, the new spinoff series Walking Dead: World Beyond will premiere, followed by The Talking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead will begin its season six the next day, on October 11th. The Comic Con trailer is here. Also read some details of what you can expect to see.

People in both the United States and the United Kingdom generally speak English, but there are plenty of words whose definitions have changed on one side of the pond or the other. If you are going to communicate with someone who speaks a different dialect than what you are used to, it would help to know which words may be confusing. Here are a few examples.  

3. Pants

It’s fine for a man to wander outside in America wearing nothing but pants. In Britain? Not so much. In the U.S., pants go on top of underpants or underwear, which are called pants in the UK. Brits wear trousers over pants.

4. Jumper

If you’re an American who read the British version of the Harry Potter series, you probably wondered why all the boys so often wore jumpers. In the UK, a jumper is a sweater, not a sleeveless dress that goes over a blouse (that’s a pinafore).

The list at Mental Floss covers more than just clothing, but it doesn't explain why a man named Randy should go by Randall when visiting Britain, nor exactly which body part a fanny is. But it will tell you something you probably don't already know.

Back in March, toilet paper suddenly disappeared from stores. The demand skyrocketed as the US locked down against the pandemic. Business Insider explains why that happened, and how TP companies responded to try to meet the demand. -via Damn Interesting

Neatorama readers are familiar with Colma, the town built as a graveyard to store San Francisco's dead when the city ran out of room around 1900. The same thing happened even earlier in London. Even though Europe's burial practices included exhuming the dead so that graves could be used again, there was a limit to how many could be interred at once. London decided to solve the problem by opening a huge graveyard outside the city.    

As a result a proposal was drawn up to use the emerging technology of mechanised transport to resolve the crisis. The scheme entailed buying a single very large tract of land around 23 miles from London to be called  the London Necropolis (now Brookwood Cemetery). At this distance, the land would be far beyond the maximum projected size of the city's growth. If the practice of only burying a single family in each grave were abandoned and the traditional practice for pauper burials of ten burials per grave were adopted, the site was capable of accommodating 28,500,000 bodies. Even with the prohibition of mass graves it would take over 350 years to fill a single layer of this monstrous cemetery!

Using parts of the existing London and South Western Railway, trains could ship bodies and mourners from London to the site easily and cheaply. Its founders envisaged dedicated coffin trains, each carrying 50–60 bodies, travelling from London to the new Necropolis in the early morning or late at night, and the coffins being stored on the cemetery site until the time of the funeral. Mourners would then be carried to the appropriate part of the cemetery by a dedicated passenger train during the day.

The scheme found widespread support, although the Bishop of London considered it inappropriate that the families of people from very different backgrounds would potentially have to share a train, and felt that it demeaned the dignity of the deceased for the bodies of respectable members of the community to be carried on a train also carrying the bodies and relatives of those who had led immoral lives.

The new cemetery opened in 1854. Funerals and transport varied in price depending on one's station in life. Read about the rise and fall of London's Necropolis Railway at  HistoryASM. -via Strange Company

A strange 12th-century incident occurred in what is now Germany that I had never heard before, and might pique your interest.

The Erfurt latrine disaster was an event that occurred in Erfurt, Duchy of Thuringia in 1184. A number of nobles from across the Holy Roman Empire were meeting in a room at the Church of St. Peter, when their combined weight caused the floor to collapse into the latrine beneath the cellar and led to dozens of nobles drowning in liquid excrement. At least 60 people died in the accident.[1]

Now, we can assume that many of those 60 people died from injuries incurred in the fall, but drowning in a latrine has to be one of the worst ways to go. Read more about this tragedy at Wikipedia. And then be thankful for modern building codes and sanitary plumbing.  -via reddit

(Image credit: GFreihalter)

My Heritage is offering a free online photo enhancer that uses artificial intelligence to sharpen blurry photographs, and even add color if you like. PetPixel explains.

Of course, we’ve seen this kind of AI-powered tech before, but the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer puts it all together into a one-click tool that does a surprisingly good job. And since it’s free to try it out, it’s helping to introduce this kind of technology to people who didn’t know that AI photo enhancement has gotten so advanced.

You can even zero in on the specific faces in each photo, downloading the full enhanced result or individual enhanced “headshots” for everybody in the photo. For this reason, the tool doesn’t enhance landscape photo since it has to detect at least once face to work properly.

For an example, I pulled up a rare photo of myself at age two. You can tell that my parents saved money on a haircut in order to afford the portrait sitting. Try out the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer yourself. -via Nag on the Lake

While you've read Mark Twain's works and have probably quoted him, you might not know much about Samuel Clemens' personal life. Clemens made friends with Charles Langdon on his trip to the Holy Land in 1868, and later met his younger sister Olivia. Olivia was educated, devout, progressive, and chronically ill, possibly with tuberculosis.   

Eventually Samuel decided Olivia was the girl for him. He had earned a Bohemian reputation that was not necessarily good for a prospective husband and so when he came and stayed for two weeks and then asked Langdon for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he received a “chilled” response from her father. Moreover, Olivia gave him a resounding “no” when he proposed marriage.

The refusal by Olivia did not dishearten Samuel. He began a vibrant epistolary courtship writing 184 courtship letters. Their letters discussed their opinions of authors and books and they also expressed their ideas about what they thought a perfect marriage entailed. Relationships between the sexes and the elements that composed a perfect husband or wife were also among the things Olivia and Samuel debated at length. Interestingly, their opinions were often radically different, and yet despite these differences Samuel became determined to marry Olivia.

Olivia turned down Samuel's proposals twice more before they married in 1870. Read about their romance and the Clemens' family life at Geri Walton's blog. -via Strange Company

Qantas said goodbye to its 747 today in style beginning with a low altitude tour of Sydney, a quick visit to retired fleet mate VH-OJA, and then a massive Qantas ‘Roo’ before heading across the Pacific. https://t.co/sDyfwbqKt3 pic.twitter.com/tDZIXChGh2

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) July 23, 2020

The Australian airline Qantas has retired its last Boeing 747 jumbo jet. As the last jet took off Wednesday with six pilots and no passengers, the flight path drew Qantas' distinctive kangaroo logo in the sky. 

Over the past week, Qantas operated three “Farewell Jumbo Joy Flights” touring Sydney, Brisbane, and Canberra with passengers on board for the final time. Today’s flight is taking the aircraft from Sydney to Los Angeles, where it will clear customs before continuing on to its final resting place in the California desert.

After making a scenic departure over Sydney and a low pass over the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) in Wollongong, which hosts a retired Qantas 747, QF7474 turned east over the Tasman Sea to draw Qantas’ iconic kangaroo.

The jet was taken to the Mojave Air and Space Port to be stripped for parts. -via BBC

Four years ago, we posted the story of Taylor Ann Linko's wedding gown. Then there's a whole other story of what happened afterward. The newlyweds moved to San Diego, and Linko was having trouble turning her art into income.

We thankfully were given a free honeymoon and enough gift/saving money to get us through June…. then July………. things are getting tight now, August, not a single sale in the new city, September….. my time was running out. Trying to be a good wife, trying to get a gig face painting, or a sale at a craft fair, or into a gallery.

I had been so blessed my whole life to chase my dream, to try and be an Artist but time was running out.

I needed to contribute to the bills. No money to fund any new art ventures, no sales, “no followers”, no income, no hope left.

But then someone shared a photograph of her colorful wedding dress, and everything changed. The viral wedding pictures led to a full-time business customizing dresses and selling painted gowns. See more of Linko's work in her gallery.  -via reddit

Naomi SV was recording her harp performance of "The Sound of Silence" when she was surprised by a videobomber the rest of us were watching since the beginning. She says,

My harp session turned into a Disney movie.

She labeled this video a "blooper," since she didn't finish the song, but this outtake has six times as many views as the completed song. -via Metafilter

This is one of the earliest "music videos," meaning an artful illustration of a song instead of a filmed performance. And I do mean art. Strangely, the music and the film existed separately before coming together in 1968. Mason Williams, who wrote and performed "Classical Gas," tells the story at the YouTube page.

During the time that CLASSICAL GAS was a hit I was also the head writer for THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR on CBS. I had seen a film titled "GOD IS DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS” at The Encore, an off beat movie house in L.A. The film was a collection of approximately 2500 classical works of art, mostly paintings, that flashed by in three minutes. Each image lasted only two film frames, or twelve images a second! At the end of the film the viewer was pronounced "cultural" since they had just covered "3000 years of art in 3 minutes!"

The film was the work of a UCLA film student named Dan McLaughlin. I contacted Dan and told him that I was interested in the idea of using his film as a visual for CLASSICAL GAS to air on THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR. (His original sound track had been Beethoven's 5th Symphony.) THE COMEDY HOUR offered him the money to finance a new film he wanted to make in exchange for the right to change the original soundtrack from Beethoven's 5th Symphony to CLASSICAL GAS and air it on the show. As a “music video" it was first shown on THE SUMMER BROTHERS SMOTHERS SHOW (Glen Campbell was the host) in the summer of 1968.

You can read the rest of the story here. We can quibble with the "3000 years of art" because there are Lascaux cave paintings included that are around 17,000 years old. -via Nag on the Lake

A dog may be man's best friend, but a dog's intelligence can vary from amazing to comically dumb. They are a peculiar species in that nature never intended to give us a pet. All domestic dogs were bred originally from wolves, with breeders aiming for features that would be useful to humans, like herding sheep or fitting into the sleeve of one's gown. It usually doesn't matter how intelligent a dog is, because he's loved and cared for by his humans anyway. But maybe they are just intelligent in a different way from what we normally think.

Indeed, considerable variation exists among dogs, as their behavior can be influenced by breed, socialization, life experiences, and so on. Importantly, however, dogs are really good at being dogs, including stuff like playing fetch, barking at the neighbors, herding sheep, mooching for snacks, and, very importantly, providing companionship. There’s literally no reason for them to be more human-like when it comes to their intelligence, even if we sometimes mistakenly project more smarts onto them than they deserve.

“Dogs are very good at what they’re bred to do—they’re excellent at doing those things, and in some cases even better than other species we think are intelligent, such as chimps and bonobos,” Zachary Silver, a PhD student from the Comparative Cognitive Lab at Yale University, told Gizmodo. “But as soon as we step outside of that domain, we see a lot of failures in cognition, including a lack of flexibility and cognitive sophistication.”

Read about the intelligence and the limitations of our dogs at Gizmodo.

There have been numerous attempts at making a decent movie out of familiar video and board games, some that did well, like Clue and Angry Birds, and others that did not, like Battleship. A few years ago, there was actually an effort to make a movie called Tetris, but it never got off the ground. The problem is the nature of the game, and whether a story can be built around it. The game Clue was already based on a familiar book and movie plot, and they made the film a comedy. Tetris has no story... or does it?   

A quick overview: Software engineer Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris (a portmanteau of "tennis" and "tetra") in 1984 while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He shared the game with his coworkers, and they copied it onto floppy discs to share with their friends. The game went viral before viral was even a thing, spreading all across Moscow and even into a software exhibit in the Hungarian Institute of Technology.

It is there that UK citizen and owner of Andromeda Software Ltd., Robert Stein found the game. He wanted to license it to distributors in the US and UK, so he went to Russia to make a deal. Unfortunately for Pajitnov, in Soviet Russia, the game plays you. Pajitnov didn't own the rights to Tetris, the game instead, falling under the purview of Elektronorgtechnica, a soviet agency created to oversee the distribution of their software to foreign countries.

In other words, Tetris is going to be a drama based on a true story about doing business in the Cold War era, and not an adaptation of game play. Read more about the upcoming production at Cracked.