Pterosapiens (Descendants of the Flyers)

A Pterosapien poses by the bizarre buildings of a seaside resort. At ten days long, this will be the only holiday in her ephemeral life.

The flyers' supercharged hearts had given them an evolutionary winning hand, and they diversified to fill up the heavens. It was only a time before the competition in the skies got too intense, even for their souped-up metabolisms.

Some lineages gave up their wings and returned to the ground, living as differing sorts of predators, herbivores and even swimmers. Their aerial adaptations gave them an edge on the ground and they produced forms of stupendous size and agility. There were wonderful beings, but no sentience came out of the terrestrial sky-beasts. Instead, civilization flowered in the skies. One species, from a line of wading, stork-like predators, evolved a brain that was large enough to imagine and act upon the world. Their feet, already versatile to catch slippery, swamp-dwelling prey, got even more articulate and assumed the role of hands. As a compensation they lost some of their aerial streamlining, but what they could not do with their bodies, they were more than able to make up with their minds.

Their power of flight made the Pterosapiens a global folk, before they could invent nations and borders. With such an inherent ease of travel, ideas and individuals diffused too fast for social differences to ossify. Acting with a planetary awareness, they farmed their gigantic, terrestrial relatives, raised cities of perches and fluting towers, harnessed the atom and began to gaze up to the stars, without having to compensate (too much) from the average individual's welfare, and without dividing up into quarrelsome factions.

As egalitarian as their life seemed, they paid a stunting, inevitable price. Their hearts, even in their boosted state, had trouble supporting their power of flight and grotesquely large brains at the same time. As a consequence, they had an ephemeral lifespan. A Pterosapien was sexually mature at two, middle-aged by sixteen and usually dead by twenty-three years of our time. This grim cycle caused them to appreciate every moment of their existence dearly, and they pondered upon it with feverish intensity. A shelf of scrolls by Pterosapien philosophers would've been the envy of every human library. In their cities, life blazed away with unreal speed, rushing past to meet fleeting deadlines.

As a species, the angelic flyers were victims of heart disease.