When the Wright Brothers took to the skies in 1903, they were relative latecomers — insects already had been buzzing around for 325 million years. But in a little over a century, our species has more than made up for its Earth-bound origins, visiting every planet in the solar system and even penetrating interstellar space.
Flight of the Archaeopteryx
Two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the discovery of a missing link between dinosaurs and birds gave evolutionary theory a fortuitous credibility boost.
(Credit: text, Jonathon Keats; image, H. Raab/Wikimedia Commons)
Found in southern Germany, the 150 million-year-old Archaeopteryx fossil combined reptilian and avian features. For the past century and a half, scientists have debated whether it could fly.
