For insects, hummingbirds, and quadcopters of similar size, there’s no danger in dropping from the sky.

J.S. Haldane in “on being the right size”:

“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble.”

(These wing suits are man-sized, so they would break their wearer on impact)

> A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

I had thought that cats could fall from any height safely, but that's not quite true: observational studies suggest [0] they have a 50% or 90% survival rate from terminal-velocity height onto hard surfaces, but not without injury.

Still, I'd expect a rat could also "walk away". It's quite a lot smaller than a cat, though it may lack other evolutionary adaptations for falling. And a rat is a mouse, taxonomically: we just informally call the bigger species of mice rats.

[0] http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/11/domestic-cat...

The dual taxonomy of so many animals is interesting. The line between a pigeon and a dove seems to be one of judgment, like with rats and mice. Or the slightly more distant mantis and roach.

Not quite. http://www.ratbehavior.org/RatsMice.htm http://www.ratbehavior.org/RatMouseHybrid.htm

Rats lack the long legs of cats that allow them to cushion their fall, though. Cats have a ton of adaptations that each help with some aspect of landing from a fall.

a huge portion of that is that humans have a much worse weight to surface area ratio, cats hit at about 60mph and humans at 120 mph. very few humans survive falls in which they reached terminal velocity.