Deep Breaths

The air hit Dakota like a wall as he stumbled out of the time pod, his boots sinking into the damp, fern-covered soil. He gasped, his chest heaving as if he’d just run a marathon. The chronometer on his wrist blinked: 75 million years BCE. Late Cretaceous. He’d made it. But something was wrong—terribly, wonderfully wrong.


He took a deep breath, or tried to. It felt like sucking molasses through a straw. His lungs burned with the effort, and his head swam. The air wasn’t just thick with the scent of prehistoric jungle—rotting leaves, wet earth, and a tang of ozone—it was dense. Crushing. Dakota fumbled with the atmospheric scanner clipped to his belt, his fingers trembling as he calibrated it. The numbers flashed: 1.9 bar. Ninety percent higher than the 1.0 bar of his native 2087.


“Impossible,” he muttered, though he knew it wasn’t. He’d studied the theories—higher oxygen levels, denser atmospheres in Earth’s deep past—but feeling it was another matter. Each breath was a labor, a reminder of how alien this world was. He glanced up through the canopy of towering cycads and saw pterosaurs wheeling in the sky, their wings cutting through the air with lazy, effortless strokes. They were massive, some with wingspans stretching fifteen meters or more. Too big, Dakota had always thought, for the physics of flight in his time.


But here? Here it made sense.


Dakota sat on a mossy rock, forcing himself to slow his breathing. The scanner hummed as it analyzed the air: 35% oxygen, compared to his era’s 21%. That alone would fuel giants, but the pressure—it was the key. He tapped his comms device, recording a log. “The atmosphere’s a beast. Nearly double the pressure of home. It’s like the air itself is holding everything up. Those pterosaurs… they’re not defying gravity.


They’re swimming in it.”


He paused, watching a dragonfly the size of a hawk dart past, its wings buzzing with a deep, resonant thrum. “And it must’ve been even higher before this,” he continued. “Millions of years earlier, in the Carboniferous or Devonian… air pressure could’ve been two, three times what I’m used to. That’s why things flew then—giant insects, early pterosaurs. The atmosphere was a cradle for them. Thick enough to lift what shouldn’t lift.”


Dakota stood, his legs wobbling under the weight of the air. He pictured it: over eons, the Earth shedding its heavy blanket, volcanoes quieting, oxygen levels dropping, pressure easing. By his time, the skies were thinner, emptier. Flight became a rarity, a privilege for the streamlined and the light.


He took another deep breath, slower this time, letting the dense air fill him. It was exhilarating, terrifying. He’d come to witness the past, but now he understood something deeper. The Earth hadn’t just changed its face—it had changed its very breath. And with it, the rules of life itself.


The pterosaurs screeched overhead, and Dakota smiled. For a moment, he envied them.