A palm-sized Triassic reptile found just outside New York opens a journey through animals that turn falling into travel. Lizards spread ribs, mammals stretch skin, frogs open webbed feet, snakes flatten their entire bodies, and flying fish carry speed from water into air.

Each solves the same problem differently: how to turn height—or speed—into a route.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.

A giant fossil bird turned up during construction at Charleston International Airport. With a wingspan of about twenty-one feet, Pelagornis sandersi opens a journey into takeoff, soaring, ocean wind, and the ancient coastal world beneath modern Charleston.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.

The famous teeth of Smilodon only worked because the rest of the cat worked with them. La Brea’s extraordinary fossil record reveals the jaws, shoulders, forelimbs, prey, and landscape behind one of the Ice Age’s most recognizable bodies.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.

A fossil skull in Klagenfurt was once taken for the remains of a dragon and helped shape the city’s famous fountain. Give that skull its body back, and it becomes a woolly rhinoceros built for cold, open ground and winter grazing.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.

Mammoths reached California’s Channel Islands by swimming. Once there, generations of giants became something very different: adult mammoths scarcely taller than a person, shaped by the costs and opportunities of island life.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.

Charles Darwin became fascinated by a tiny sundew growing on English heathland. Its glittering leaves open into a remarkable plant mechanism: a leaf that can trap, sense, move, digest, and absorb an animal meal.

Narrated with a synthetic voice.