So many of us fall in love with dinosaurs as children that spending time learning about them as an adult feels cheeky, in a nostalgic way. My mum once told me she hadn’t fully appreciated the power of peer pressure until my older brother’s friend, aged six, said a velociraptor lived in the local meadows and she was completely unable to persuade us otherwise. I don’t remember the velociraptor incident but I do remember my brother and I spending hours convincing ourselves that shadowy shapes passing over our house were pterodactyls (almost definitely seagulls).

Palaeontology still strikes us with awe as adults, partly because it holds up a kind of mirror to humankind. Nicholas Longrich tackles some of the biggest questions about evolution in his article about how the extinction of the dinosaurs laid the path forHomo sapiensand how things might have been if Earth hadn’t had a chance collision with an asteroid. Even now I feel a lingering affection for theT. rex, a creature which when alive would have squished me like a bug. So it’s hard not to feel some regret for the world that almost was.

In another incredible story from the deep past, Paul Pearson writes about how new research into a cache of gold coins shows that a Roman emperor, believed to be a myth for over 150 years, was in fact real. Plus we investigated why only a fraction of rape cases reported to the police will make it to a court of law, in a long read that takes an unflinching look at why such little progress is being made on the issue.

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