Burial at sea can result in amazing preservation, including remains of the ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that swam the seas 180 million years ago. Fossil remains of ichthyosaurs have been found over the last hundred years that included outlines in the rock. Scientists didn't know whether the outlines surrounding the bones were remnants of the animal's original size, or were left by the microorganisms that consumed the carcass. What was between the outline and the bones? Did ichthyosaurs have a layer of blubber? Could there still be evidence of flesh or skin? Lund University paleontologist Johan Lindgren took an uncontaminated fossil and subjected it to a battery of modern chemical tests.

First, Lindgren's team analyzed the ichthyosaur's skin, which the fossil preserved in astounding detail. Researchers could make out the skin's individual layers and even the folds that formed as the animal decayed.

Strikingly, the researchers found traces of melanophores, specialized cells that contain the pigment melanin. While such a find dates back to the 1950s in ichthyosaurs, Lindgren's team took a decidedly 21st-century approach. Using high-powered spectroscopes and x-rays, researchers scanned the fossil for melanin and reconstructed the melanophores in 3-D. The team found that, like many marine animals today, the ichthyosaur's back was darker in color than its belly. This form of coloration, called countershading, would have helped the animal disguise itself in the water and regulate its body temperature.

Researchers also saw hints of blubber within the preserved skin. Chemical tests suggest that the layer isn't a modern contaminant or protein-based like the other skin layers. Instead, it's a yellowish, fatty band, approximately where dolphins and leatherback turtles have blubber today.

The scientists won't go as far as to say that the ichthyosaur was warm-blooded, but teh possibility is there, and their resemblance to modern dolphins and whales is intriguing. Read more on the latest research at National Geographic.  -via Shaena Montanari

This video presentation from the American Museum of Natural History traces what we know about human evolution by combining a timeline, a map, animation, photographs, and artistic representations of various hominins. It's a fascinating visual presentation of data. You have to wonder what the world was like when different species of hominins lived in the same geographical era. It's hard enough for us to get along with each other now that we're all one species. -via Laughing Squid

We all know the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields Forever," but Strawberry Field (without the "s") is a real place. Eddie Deezen touched on it when he told us the story of how the song came about. In this video, Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out gives us more on the history of the actual institution in Liverpool.

DEVELOPING: Police and medics on scene of large crowd at the Clarendon Cheesecake Factory amid a free cheesecake promotion https://t.co/92Tpaapybs pic.twitter.com/YvVQIErXcm

— Arlington Now (@ARLnowDOTcom) December 5, 2018

The Cheesecake Factory had a promotional giveaway on Wednesday that ended in chaos. The restaurant offered a free slice of cheesecake to those who ordered through the food delivery service DoorDash. The promotion was to start at 11:30 AM and give away 40,000 slices of cheesecake, delivered to the recipient's door. Within two hours, DoorDash posted that all the cheesecake on the East Coast had been claimed. Orders came in through the afternoon and were met with disappointment. Restaurants were flooded with delivery people.

A Cheesecake Factory in Arlington County, Virginia, faced chaos severe enough to required police intervention, ARLnow.com reported.

According to the local news station, police and medics responded to get the crowds under control as DoorDash delivery people flooded The Cheesecake Factory location. Police were called after a fight reportedly broke out in the restaurant. They arrived to discover "an unruly crowd of delivery drivers inside the restaurant, trying to pick up orders, and a rash of double parking around the Clarendon area," though there was not a fight going on at the time.

One person was arrested for disorderly conduct at the Arlington location. The Cheesecake Factory ended up giving away 60,000 slices of cheesecake, and claimed to be surprised by the response. Who knew that so many people would respond to an offer for free cheesecake delivered to their door? Read more about the fiasco at Business Insider. -via Metafilter

Human resilience includes the ability to take a failed idea (or even a successful one) and use it for a completely different purpose. It happens all the time. The new purpose then become the main purpose, and the original intent is often forgotten. You've read about the origins of some these things right here at Neatorama, but there's always something new to learn.

See all 18 pictofacts about repurposed objects at Cracked.

This video has a distinct lack of blockbuster tentpole movies, which only makes it more intriguing. Film critic David Ehrlich not only selected the best movies of 2018, but deftly edited relevant clips into the music, matching both the rhythm and the lyrics. After a three-minute musical intro montage that hooks you in, the actual countdown begins. This visual treat will introduce you to some films you didn't see this year, but will want to check out on home video. Bonus: lots of Queen music. -via Digg

While humans and elephants have existed side-by-side for millions of years, the rise of colonialism introduced the exploitation of the word's largest land animals. They were hunted for food and ivory. They were turned into beasts of burden and used for transportation. They were imported for circuses and zoos. They became protagonists in beloved children's books. And now that the elephant population has seriously declined, we are turning to saving them. “Game Change: Elephants from Prey to Preservation” is a new exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History that shows how elephants went from prey to a revered species that represents our relationship to nature.  

“To see [elephants] as the ecologically important beasts that they are, means they are not Babar,” says Marshall Jones of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who spoke recently at a panel discussion on the occasion of the show’s opening. “There is still another evolutionary step we have to go through in our own understanding,”

While the cartoons Babar, Horton and Dumbo, are childlike, playful and fun, global human-elephant relations are serious fare. African elephants face a poaching crisis. Asian elephants, numbering just a mere 40,000—a tenth of the African elephant population—are fending off encroaching extinction. In communities across Asia, elephants regularly destroy homes, crops and livelihoods. In Sri Lanka alone, a country close to the size of West Virginia with 20 million people and 5,000 elephants, roughly 70 people and 250 elephants are killed annually due to the human-elephant conflict.

“Could you imagine us tolerating, in West Virginia, 5,000 of an animal that . . . kills people?” Jones asks. “We wouldn’t tolerate that in this country, and yet [the people of Sri Lanka] do and they’re trying to achieve that balance.”

Read more about the human-elephant relationship, and how it has changed over time, at Smithsonian magazine.

DJ Earworm is back with his annual mashup of the biggest songs of the year! For 2018, the theme is Turnin' It Up. The songs include:

Ariana Grande - No Tears Left to Cry
Ariana Grande - Thank U, Next
Bazzi - Mine
Bebe Rexha & Florida Georgia Line - Meant to Be
BlocBoy JB & Drake - Look Alive
Bruno Mars & Cardi B - Finesse
Camila Cabello - Never Be the Same
Cardi B feat. Bad Bunny and J. Balvin - I Like It
Childish Gambino - This is America
Drake - God's Plan
Drake - In My Feelings
Drake - Nice for What
Dua Lipa - New Rules
Ella Mai - Boo'd Up
Halsey - Bad at Love
Juice WRLD - Lucid Dreams
Khalid & Normani - Love Lies
Maroon 5 & Cardi B - Girls Like You
Marshmello & Bastille - Happier
Post Malone - Better Now
Post Malone & Ty Dolla Sign - Psycho
Travis Scott & Drake - Sicko Mode
XXXTentacion - SAD!
Zedd Feat. Maren Morris and Grey - The Middle
5 Seconds of Summer - Youngblood

Also check out DJ Earworm's previous annual mashups. -via Tastefully Offensive

If there is one thing all humans have in common, it's that we eat. If there are two things all humans have in common, it's that we pass along dubious wisdom about the food we eat. Some food myths start off with a plausible connection to reality, while others may have been born as a joke. Either way, many have been passed down over generations until no one know how they started. Here's one I heard in childhood:

“Cherries and milk are poison. I must have been about 6 or 7 when I first heard this one. It was common knowledge among the kids in my neighborhood. We all believed the two were deadly poison when combined. And some of the kids in school claimed they knew somebody who heard it from someone that a third grader once dropped dead in the school lunchroom when he dropped some cherries into his carton of milk and drank it. One summer, my brother and I were visiting our grandparents. One morning my brother got mad at me and dropped a couple of maraschino cherries into my glass of milk. I drank most of the milk before I found the deadly fruit. The oft-repeated family story states that I went hysterical when I found them. My grandma laughed and told me that I wasn’t going to die. To prove her point, she drank the rest of the milk and ate the cherries. My grandpa scolded her, ‘Now, Ruth, don’t go drinking poison in front of the children! You’ll give them ideas!’” — David Hall, Spokane, Washington

You may have been told not to go swimming for a half hour after eating. In some places, that myth was wildly overblown.

“According to this myth, after having lunch on the beach, you have to wait at least a couple of hours before taking a bath (either in the sea, in a lake, in a bathtub, etc.), otherwise you’ll potentially die by congestion. Some say two hours, some say three, some say exactly two and a half. It’s something that all Italians have heard at least once in their life, from their mothers during summer holidays at sea. If it was real, each summer there would be lots of casualties on Italian shores.” — Pietro, Italy

Atlas Obscura crowdsourced a project on food myths and got hundreds of responses from readers. Read the 52 weirdest and most interesting ones.

(Image credit: Ryan Snook)

These five friends got together to do a photo shoot illustrating No-Shave November. They've done it every year since 2013, with a different theme each year. You can seriously enlarge the picture here. Redditor jammies posted the image, explaining that her boyfriend is the one referred to as "eyebrows." The one guy without a beard is an EMT, and is only allowed a mustache. This year, the group dressed as firefighters to draw attention to the victims of the California Camp Fire. Why are they not in the same order each year? She explained that their pictures were taken individually and Photoshopped together. Why can't they get together to take a group picture? Oh, they were together when the pictures were taken. Apparently, they only had one costume, and had to take turns wearing it!

Researchers at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities have completed a retrofit of a 1924 home that makes it a "zero emission" energy-efficient building. HouseZero employs both solar and geothermal energy, but the amazing part is all the computerized parts that make the house fend for itself. Sensors through the building compute what systems to employ, and the windows open and close themselves. That in itself will make you fear the repair costs when one thing stops working. Natural ventilation will save you tons of money on air conditioning, but here in the humid South, you may also have to contend with mold on your organic furnishings: wood, leather, and cotton. Don't ask me how I know. -via Digg

Charles Sobhraj first went to jail for burglary in 1963. That began a life of crime that ranged from prison escape to extortion to murder across a large part of the world. He committed crimes in Thailand, France, India, Nepal, and Malaysia. Sobhraj even murdered a couple of Americans. He was known as the Bikini Killer.  

Sobhraj had earned that nickname, along with “Serpent,” in the 1970s after committing two dozen murders followed by audacious prison escapes. He was a media obsession, one he fed with his flamboyant lifestyle even when behind bars, which included conjugal visits from fans and weekend parties allowed by prison staffers. On the outside, Sobhraj often posed as a drug dealer, befriending tourists and then killing them once their guard was down. According to Ananta Raj Luitel, co-author of Charles Sobhraj: Crime and Punishment, Sobhraj often seduced his victims — a few of whom were clad in bikinis when their bodies were found, thus his moniker — before killing them.

The 1986 escape from a prison in Tihar, India, was not Sobhraj's only escape, but it involved a cat, and so makes an interesting story as an introduction to this world-renowned murderer.

Cyberdyne Boston Dynamics' robot Spot impressed us with its dancing a few weeks ago, but sometimes it acts like a typical big dog (not to be confused with BigDog). He wants out, and he knows how to open the door. The hockey player/roboticist in charge tries to assert his authority, but when you gotta go, you gotta go! This is why robots will end up killing us all. -via reddit

As I grew up, ladies' lounges adjacent to restrooms were common in department stores and hotels, and it was a familiar spot inside my small town's movie theater. It was a place to gather, to smoke, to hide from a bad date or to discuss a good one. There was no lounge for the men's restroom, so we assumed it was a little bonus for all the sexism that came with being a woman in the 20th century. But when you look into how ladies' lounges came about, the sexism was there from the beginning.

It was rooted in the idea of separate spheres: that women’s place was in the home and men’s was outside, in public. So when middle-class women did venture into public for extended periods—when they went to the theater, for example—it was thought that they required a private, safe, gender-segregated space of their own that looked and functioned like part of their home. “They were designed like living rooms—like parlors—as spaces to protect virtue,” Wood said.

But at first, these lounges for women did not include a toilet component, says Terry Kogan, a law professor at the University of Utah. Kogan has worked on guidelines for gender-neutral bathrooms and is an expert on the legal and cultural norms that mandate the segregation of public restrooms by sex.

“Interestingly, ornate lounges for women preceded public restrooms by several decades,” Kogan explained, noting that there were parlors for women in public buildings many years prior to when most of America had indoor plumbing. In other words, gender separation and protecting women’s virtue was initially the justification for these spaces, and the toilet came later.

The history of the lounge is how public toilets came to be called "restrooms." Ladies' lounges are becoming more rare, which is a shame, since it's still nice to have a place to touch up your hair and makeup, to breastfeed or change a baby's diaper, or to just rest on a long day of shopping without having to pay for food or drink. Which are reasons to have them for men, too, outside of breastfeeding. Read the history of restroom lounges at CityLab. -via Digg

An old man in the apocalypse dedicates his life to protecting the last living plant on earth. Will he succeed? It won't take long to find out- the story wastes no time in exposition. This animation was produced by fourth-semester students at the Mediadesign Hochschule in Berlin. -via Laughing Squid