Gotta love this quote from the LA Times:

Discovered in 1860, only a year after Charles Darwin published his famous “On the Origin of Species,” the raven-sized archaeopteryx was generally assumed to show evolution in action. It had the feathers and wishbones of birds, but it also retained the teeth, tail and three-fingered hands of dinosaurs.

But new studies of its bones and those of other fossils, by a team led by paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University and the American Museum of Natural History, show that it was much less bird and far more dinosaur than had been believed.

It continues:

Examining other early fossils, they concluded that modern bird physiology did not begin to appear until Confuciusornis, a toothless bird from the Yixian geological formation in China that did not appear until 20 million years after archaeopteryx.

Wikipedia (that great source of  reliable information) seems to contradict this:

Archaeopteryx, sometimes referred to by its German name Urvogel (“original bird” or “first bird”), is the earliest and most primitive bird known.

This confusion regarding historical science underlines again just why evolution is just as much a fact as gravity.  Yeah, right!

As the famous Stephen J. Gould wrote: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology.“