Nature - 2019 May - Vol 569 No 7755

Some magazines promise lifestyle tips. Some promise celebrity gossip. Nature – Vol. 569 No. 7755 (May 2019) instead opens with a feathery dinosaur-bat hybrid soaring majestically across the cover while calmly informing readers that our understanding of the evolution of flight may need revising. Which is exactly the sort of thing you want from an international science journal on an ordinary Thursday afternoon.

The headline “A CLASH OF WINGS” sounds less like peer-reviewed palaeontology and more like an aggressively expensive fantasy novel. Inside awaits the glorious revelation that evolution, once again, refuses to proceed in a tidy straight line for the convenience of textbook writers. Apparently prehistoric creatures were experimenting with flight in ways so strange that modern scientists had to stop, stare at the fossils, and collectively mutter: “Well that complicates things.”

The cover creature itself — all membranous wings, fluffy body, and deeply uncertain posture — looks like nature briefly attempted to invent a dragon via committee meeting. It is magnificent. One suspects this animal existed entirely to upset future illustrators and confuse schoolchildren for generations to come.

Elsewhere in the issue, the mood remains reassuringly apocalyptic. There are discussions about fixing the world’s broken food system, human disruption of rivers, and the global obesity epidemic, proving once again that modern science magazines specialise in alternating between wonder and low-level dread every two pages. You begin reading about prehistoric flight and end up confronting civilisation’s relationship with hydrology and processed carbohydrates. It is a remarkable emotional journey for a publication technically filed under “periodicals”.

One of the enduring charms of Nature is the sheer confidence of its editorial tone. It never panics. It simply presents humanity’s escalating list of planetary-scale complications in elegant typography beside stunning artwork. “Rivers have been catastrophically altered by human activity,” it says politely, before moving on to molecular biology as though this is all perfectly manageable.

And naturally, owning a copy of Nature carries enormous cultural theatre. Leaving it visible on a desk instantly upgrades you from “person with magazines” to “individual potentially involved in advanced research”. Nobody needs to know you mainly bought it because the flying dinosaur looked brilliant. That is between you and the fossil record.

This May 2019 edition also captures a fascinating scientific moment: the tail end of the 2010s, when the world still believed increasingly detailed research papers might gradually solve everything before reality fully descended into algorithmic confusion and doomscrolling. There is an optimism here — cautious, highly footnoted optimism — that feels oddly comforting now.

Condition is listed as Good, meaning this copy has survived the usual hazards associated with serious scientific literature: commuter bags, overambitious bedside reading piles, coffee consumed during failed attempts to understand evolutionary biomechanics, and perhaps a lecturer underlining things furiously at 2am.

A superb issue for science enthusiasts, dinosaur obsessives, aspiring intellectuals, or anyone who enjoys publications that casually combine prehistoric wing membranes, planetary sustainability, and existential concern about food systems into one beautifully intimidating package.

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