The following stretch what you mean by "earth like" to the fringes of our world, but might be doable.
Option 1: Penguin Planet
We know that some birds -- penguins -- went flightless in order to swim better and eat fish, near the Antarctic. It is plausible that an ice planet, with most of its behavior happening inside the oceans, penalizes flying beasts too much relative to the amount of additional food they can get. The only organisms that survive outside of the ocean are those which live in burrows in the ice and hunt in the ocean, making it terribly inefficient to fly.
Option 2: Irradiated Desert Planet
The magnetic field is weaker, the planet is heavier and drier, and the sun is perhaps bigger and bluer and we are a bit further out to compensate. This is a very speculative possibility of tweaking a lot of different parameters a little bit to get a similar-but-very-different Earth.
The idea is that the candidate atmosphere has a much weaker ozone layer and is more transparent to carcinogenic light -- UV, X, and gamma rays all have photon energies which can break typical chemical bonds. However, there is a possibility that this is mediated near the planet's oceans and surface because the surface is heated a bit more than Earth's usually is (which requires a bit more gravity) , causing air currents to be much stronger and storms rage over the planet.
The idea is that the experience "on the ground" is one of a perpetual smoggy haze mixed between fogs and dust, somewhat obscuring direct sunlight; the hope is that this provides protection from the carcinogenic radiation close to the planet's surface. There would still be sheltered places -- caves, canyons -- which see the development of flight, but it would no longer be a worldwide phenomenon.
So this idea is to hit the birds and insects with a triple or quadruple whammy: yes you can hypothetically fly but (a) you'll be more likely to get cancer and (b) you'll not be able to see your prey and (c) you'll have to ground yourself for cover anyway when the daily hurricane blows through and (d) your bones have to be even lighter and more frail to resist the extra gravity.
In response to these, perhaps flying per se is no longer a common design goal, but perhaps gliding is more prevalent. One can imagine membranes like sugar gliders have, or one can imagine that lighter insects throw up a "kite" of spider-silk and "sail" to distant locations like spores and such do.