And most have not. Furthermore, recent discoveries have filled in even more of the "missing links" in the dinosaur-to-bird transition. More information. Another excellent site. Here's an amusing excerpt from that last link:
And really, the Birds-Are-Not-Dinosaurs (BAND) group seriously are a constant source of amusement to me. As soon as one theory on why birds cannot be dinosaurs is demolished by a new discovery, the BAND crowd come up with a new theory that is even less plausible than their previous one. Over the past few years, these folks have adopted more positions than the Kama Sutra.
Archaeopteryx [...] was not a dinosaur. It was a bird.
It's always funny listening to creationists try to explain Archaeopteryx. The reason it's so funny is that half of them declare it to be "obviously" just a bird -- and the other half declare it to be "obviously" just a reptile.
So it's a bird, eh? Well that explains the wings and feathers and so on. But how then do you explain these clearly reptilian features?
Premaxilla and maxilla are not horn-covered. This is posh talk for "does not have a bill."[The above condensed from All About Archaeopteryx by Chris Nedin, which has far more information and quotes from primary research.Trunk region vertebra are free. In birds the trunk vertebrae are always fused.
Pubic shafts with a plate-like, and slightly angled transverse cross-section. A Character shared with dromaeosaurs but not with other dinosaurs or birds.
Cerebral hemispheres elongate, slender and cerebellum is situated behind the mid-brain and doesn't overlap it from behind or press down on it. This again is a reptilian feature. In birds the cerebral hemispheres are stout, cerebellum is so much enlarged that it spreads forwards over the mid-brain and compresses it downwards.
Neck attaches to skull from the rear as in dinosaurs not from below as in modern birds. The site of neck attachement (from below) is characteristic in birds, _Archaeopteryx_ does not have this character, but is the same as theropod dinosaurs.
Center of cervical vertebrae have simple concave articular facets. This is the same as the archosaur pattern. In birds the vertebrae are different, they have a saddle-shaped surface: "The most striking feature of the vertebrae is the simple disk-like facets of their centra, without any sign of the saddle-shaped articulations found in other birds" (de Beer 1954, p. 17).
Long bony tail with many free vertebrae up to tip (no pygostyle). Birds have a short tail and the caudal vertebrae are fused to give the pygostyle.
Premaxilla and maxilla bones bear teeth. No modern bird possess teeth.
Ribs slender, without joints or uncinate processes and do not articulate with the sternum. Birds have stout ribs with uncinate processes (braces between them) and articulate with the sternum.
Pelvic girdle and femur joint is archosaurian rather than avian (except for the backward pointing pubis as mentioned above).
The Sacrum (the vertebrae developed for the attachment of pelvic girdle) occupies 6 vertebra. This is the same as in reptiles and especially ornithipod dinosaurs. The bird sacrum covers between 11-23 vertebrae!
Metacarpals (hand) free (except 3rd metacarpal), wrist hand joint flexible. This is as in reptiles. In birds the metacarpals are fused together with the distal carpals in the carpo-metacarpus, wrist /hand fused.
Nasal opening far forward, separated from the eye by a large preorbital fenestra (hole). This is typical of reptiles, but not of birds.
Deltoid ridge of the humerus faces anteriorly as do the radial and ulnar condyles. Typical of reptiles but not found in birds.
Claws on 3 unfused digits. No modern adult bird has 3 claws, nor do they have unfused digits.
The fibula is equal in length to the tibia in the leg. This again is a typical character of reptiles. In birds the fibula is shortened and reduced. [When you eat a chicken drumstick, the fibula is the toothpick-like sliver of bone you find lying alongside the large "legbone", which is the tibia. Ich.]
Metatarsals (foot bones) free. In birds these are fused to form the tarsometatarsus.
Gastralia present. Gastralia are "ventral ribs," elements of dermal bone in the ventral wall of the abdomen. Typical of reptiles, they are absent in birds
Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
I have to warn you, if you've gotten your "information" from creationist sources, you've likely been woefully misinformed and underinformed.
(unlike Archaeoraptor which was a known hoax)
That's overstating the case. It's more accurate to say it was a fraud. And not by those evil(tm) evolutionists, either, as creationists like to imply. More than anything else, it was a comedy of errors.
The Chinese farmer who found the original specimen knew that it would sell for more money to fossil collectors if it was more complete, so he shaped and glued plausible (to him) pieces he had found nearby onto a broken specimen. He was just trying to make a buck, not hoax anyone into any particular scientific conclusion.
It was eventually bought by a husband-wife team of semi-professional fossil collectors (dubbed "hobbyists" in some accounts), who decided they had something interesting and brought it to the attention of National Geographic magazine, hoping for fame and fortune. If it turned out to be significant, it could be their Big Break in the fossil community.
National Geographic normally doesn't publish new discoveries without first having them peer-reviewed in advance by scientists (even though, note, National Geographic is not itself a "scientific" publication). For various reasons they neglected to do so this time, and the result was egg on their faces.
Through a number of communication failures, red flags raised by several members of the team examining the specimen were not communicated to the right people (some of which were out in the field working on other projects), and eventually National Geographic went to press with an announcment of a new "discovery" that turned out to have been incorrectly assembled like a jigsaw puzzle. (Note: The fact that the specimen was glued together in several places was not itself a tip-off, since specimens are often broken into several pieces naturally prior to being discovered, or broken during recovery, and then glued together to retain their form.)
It was only a matter of weeks before the attention created by the publication resulted in a flood of scientists pointing out the obviously inauthentic nature of the specimen, and National Geographic published an embarrassed retraction and post-mortem analysis of how they had managed to screw up.
Significantly, the two *science* journals to which the fossil owners had submitted papers on the specimen (prior to the National Geographic publication) had rejected them. The journal Nature rejected it because National Geographic would not give them enough time to properly peer review the matter before NG's publication, and they would not print it without peer review (good for them, this is why peer-review is a critical scientific "reality check").
The paper was then submitted to the journal Science, which rejected it, saying they required more proof of Archaeoraptor's birdlike qualities. The paper was rewritten and resubmitted, and again rejected as inadequate.
So contrary to creationist claims about this debacle, 1) the fraud was perpetrated by a Chinese farmer out to make a buck, not an agenda-driven scientist, 2) the mass-market magazine National Geographic was responsible for the premature announcement of its alleged "missing link" status, not the science community nor science journals, 3) actual science journals rejected it, and 4) scientists were the first to identify it as a fraud as soon as they got a look at it.
Rather than being a story of science's alleged frauds or errors, it's actually a story of how self-correcting science is.