"I must go down to the sea again--to the lonely sea and the sky." This famous poem by John Masefield, former Poet Laureate of England, was one I had to memorize in school many, many years ago. It is a beautiful and moving poem, but I could never identify with it myself.

There is a growing consensus that Archaeopteryx, a bird whose fossils have been found in the Solnhofen Plattenkalk of Franconia (West Germany), was indeed capable of flight. The claim, however, that Archaeopteryx was a transitional form between reptiles and birds simply won't fly.