The story of life is amazing.
These transitions from sea to land to air and back again have happened many times, not just once, in the history of life. I am not a trained specialist in biology or geology so this survey is selective, and hopefully not too erroneous. I’ll use S for sea, L for land, and A for air.
S-to-L #1. The first colonization of land by any kind of life was cyanobacteria, believe it or not.
S-to-L #2. Plants come next! Moss-like plants started plant life on land, and things grew upward from there.
S-to-L #3. The first colonization of land by animals came with invertebrates! Insects, arachnids, centipedes and millipedes had the run of the place for many millions of years before anything with four feet and lungs joined them. Amazing, isn’t it? We think lungs are so indispensable for land life because all birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals have them, but multiple large families of animal life survived on land long before lungs and are still with us here today.
S-to-L #4. Finally, later: vertebrates! Specifically, early pre-amphibians. It wouldn’t be until reptiles that we vertebrates could actually have eggs hatching outside of water. But when vertebrates came on land, their legs were homologous with fins – in the same places with similar shapes and bones – and their lungs were specialized versions of organs that some fish (lungfish) already had.
L-to-S #1. Many millions of years later, in various waves, land creatures returned to the sea. This kind of movement isn’t suggested at all by a progressive creation model, yet it’s quite common in life’s history! There were at least three different major events like this among prehistoric reptiles alone. The first were ichthyosaurs, large dolphin-shaped reptiles.
L-to-S #2. The second were mosasaurs. This was the attraction in Jurassic World’s “SeaWorld-esque” scene.
L-to-S #3. The third were plesiosaurs. Think Nessie. All three of these migrations were independent of one another, and all three lineages are now extinct.
L-to-S #4. Also among reptiles, we have more recent seaward migrations with living examples: sea turtles,
L-to-S #5. and sea snakes. Both of these live almost their entire lives in the water, despite looking a lot like their land-dwelling counterparts.
L-to-S #6. Several mammalian branches have returned to the water as well. There is abundant evidence including several transitional fossils (plus genetics) that whales and dolphins (collectively, cetaceans) are closely related to ungulates like hippos, cows, deer, giraffes, camels, pigs, and camels.
L-to-S #7. In Afrotheria, the ancient mammalian group that includes elephants and hyraxes, we have the manatees and dugongs (sirenia). Again, all these groupings are confirmed by BOTH bones AND genes.
L-to-S #8. Among the carnivores on the dog side of the family, we have on the one hand seals and sea lions (pinnipeds) and,
L-to-S #9. more recently, among the weasels, we also see sea otters.
These are all marine creatures to varying degrees, of course, but I have left off semi-aquatic species like platypus (a monotreme) and beavers, to say nothing of penguins from the bird side.
L-to-A #1. The first jump to powered flight was not a vertebrate, of course, but insects!
L-to-A #2. Even among vertebrates, before birds we had pterosaurs like pterodactyl. This development of flight happened independently of the emergence of birds.
L-to-A #3. Eventually, one small line of dinosaurs radiated into all the birds we see today. There is an extensive literature on the development of the modern feather from its early beginnings as an insulation material in earlier dinosaurs to the highly specialized tool of powered flight we see in the bird family today. All of this is clearly observable in the fossil record.
L-to-A #4. Ah, but that’s not all! Among mammals we have chiropterans, the bats. Admittedly this is one transition that has little in the way of transitional fossils – which is remarkable because it’s the exception rather than the rule – but molecular studies put bats as an early branch-off from a superorder family alongside perissodactyls (horses, rhinos, tapirs), even-toed ungulates (all those cow relatives from before, including whales), carnivores, and others.
Again, this only counts powered flight, not the many gliding species.
So you see… there is not a single origin for land-dwelling animals or flying animals. God, working through evolution, has seen fit to provide for this sort of change many times. Every time He does, these transitions bear the hallmarks of evolution: both genetic similarities and structural similarities.
Is this along the lines of what you were looking for?