Origin of Birds

Guys, I'm currently writing an article to debunk Harun Yahya nonsense about the evolution of birds. As I see it, HY got his arguments mainly from quoting Alan Feduccia, opponent of John Ostrom's dino-bird theory, and said that the recently found Four-Wings Microraptor gui is trouble for the dino-bird theorists.FYI, I am also skeptic about the dino-bird link. I am in favor of Alan Feduccia's stem reptile-bird theory, as did Larry Martin & Ernst Mayr (as stated in What evolution is). The problems of the dino-bird theory such as 1,2,3 (dino) vs 2,3,4 (bird) digits, short forelimbs, and impossibility of ground-up flight precursor, convinced me that the Ostrom theory is bunk. And that puts us in a strange position, as if agreeing with the Harun Yahya Co. Given the perfect-transitional morphological and temporal state of Archaeopteryx, one must be a real close-minded bigot to say that birds did not evolve from reptiles (but not raptors IMO).I am working on a series of illustrations depicting the change in skeletal morphology from stem reptiles to Archy to Four-Wings to Ichtyornis to modern domestic chicken. However I ran into trouble in finding the perfect pre-Archaeopteryx reptile. Chinese Sinosauropteryx and other seemingly 'primitive' species came from Cretaceous strata while Archy turned up in Jurassic Solnhofen. And nobody has cleared up on the dubious Protoavis.Which Triassic/Jurassic species can be considered the beste candidate for the pre-Archy stage? I welcome your suggestions.

Bump. And does anybody have illustrations/photos of Chatterjee's Protoavis? Harun Yahya claimed that it was a modern bird.

Anybody got Chatterjee's Protoavis paper?Btw, why do we start talking about ducks and loons?

Of course the dino-bird hypothesis will need to account for the absence of more ancestral forms in pre-Archaeopteryx times. I know that the fossil record is spotty, but if you have a group of raptors with a decent fossil record in Mid to Late Cretaceous and say that they gave rise to Archaeopteryx which existed some 80 million years before, then where were they in the Jurassic?Or is it the other way round? Raptors evolved from ancient birds, maybe? I can imagine pterosaurs keeping birds from exploiting air niches in the Age of Dinosaurs, until God decided that they are no longer needed and hurl the Chixculub bolide to Yucatan to finish them off with the rest of the big reptiles. Maybe the ancient birds were exploiting a more terrestrial niche back then, that would explain the flightless birds Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx.Who knows? We are badly in need of fossils.

Please elaborate, which fossils are they? I have no problem with raptors having feathers. My hypothesis would be that raptors evolved from ancient birds.Btw I finally got my hands on that Chatterjee paper (it was a nasty 14MB pdf from JSTOR). As some of you might already know, his Protoavis are widely misused by creationists as an example of 'perfect bird--proof of creation'. And having seen the fossil bones, I laughed. Protoavis looks just like Archaeopteryx!! Teeth, fingered wings, long tail... can't mistake it for modern birds!