Archaeopteryx: Reptile to Bird

Once when i was sharing the Gospel with some college students discussing how Darwinism is false and that we are not a result of time+matter+chance but that we are wonderfully created by the Creator. I was telling them how even fossil records doesn’t support Natural Selection or Macro Evolution and there among the students one guy immediately googled this bird Archaeopteryx and showed me how fossil record shows the transition of reptile into bird. I had done my home work on macro evolution and fossil records but somehow i didn’t notice this. I tried explaining him about the fossil records but he wouldn’t buy. I came back home and went through my books that I’ve been reading on this subject and there it was and i was like how did i miss this.

Archaeopteryx (“old wing”), a fossil bird which appears in the rocks estimated to be 145 million years old, was discovered soon after the publication of The Origin of Species, and it thus helped enormously to establish the credibility of Darwinism. Archaeopteryx has a number of skeletal features which suggest a close kinship to a small dinosaur called Compsognathus. It is on the whole bird-like, with wings, feathers, and wishbone, but it has claws on its wings and teeth in its mouth. No modern bird has teeth, although some ancient ones did, and there is a modern bird, the hoatzin, which has claws.
In Archaeopteryx we therefore have a possible bird ancestor rather than a certain one. As in the cases of mammals, there is plenty of difficulty in imagining how any single ancestor could have produced descendants as varied as the penguin, the hummingbird, and the ostrich, through viable intermediate stages.

I reject this as a possible bird ancestor for Two reasons:
1. It was found in a fine-grained German limestone formation said to be Late Jurassic (the Jurassic period is said to have begun 190 million years ago, lasting 54 million years). Thus, Archaeopteryx is not a likely candidate as the missing link, since birds and their alleged ancestral dinosaurs thrived during the same period.

2. To say that Archaeopteryx is a missing link between reptiles and birds, one must believe that scales evolved into feathers for flight. Air friction acting on genetic mutation supposedly frayed the outer edges of reptilian scales. Thus, in the course of millions of years, scales became increasingly like feathers until, one day, the perfect feather emerged. To say the least, this idea must stretch the credulity of even the most ardent evolutionists.

The sober fact is that Archaeopteryx appears abruptly in the fossil record, with masterfully engineered wings and feathers common in the birds observable today. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard and Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History, both militant evolutionists, have concluded that Archaeopteryx cannot be viewed as a transitional form.