It is creationist dogma, not Junior, which only gives you two choices. You have to lump Archaeopteryx in a bin, bird or dinosaur, swear that everything in the bird bin is "just a bird," swear that everything in the dinosaur bin is "just a dinosaur and nothing but," and then resume demanding evidence that the bins are anything but inviolable. This approach to the data ignores and tries to deny that as you go back in time toward the point of divergence, it becomes harder and harder to assign the "correct" bin. Some creationists decide that Archaeopteryx is a dinosaur. Given that no modern reptile can be confused with any modern bird, it's funny that such a problem comes up as you go back in time.
It's the same thing with creationists, apes, and humans.
As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to tell which are which. In fact, there are a number of creationists who have changed their opinion on some fossils. They do not even appear to be converging towards a consistent opinion. Gish and Taylor both used to consider Peking Man an ape and 1470 a human, but now Gish says they are both apes, and Taylor says they were both humans. Interestingly, widely differing views are held by two of the most prominent creationist researchers on human origins, Gish and Lubenow. Bowden, who has also written a book on human evolution, agrees with neither of them, and Mehlert, who has written a number of articles on human evolution in creationist journals, has yet another opinion, as does Cuozzo in his 1998 book on Neandertals.Sorry the sketch doesn't look more like "A bird! Just a bird!" Let me know if anything else about it doesn't match public information on Archaeopteryx.
I've noticed after four years that when creationists make a big show of demanding "the missing links," it doesn't mean a thing. They want to appear to demand physical evidence, but they're chanting a mantra and, when confronted with counterexamples, disallowing any reasoning from physical evidence they don't like. Basically, you're 80 percent "seminar debaters," rather akin to the seminar callers who used to phone C-SPAN during impeachment.
Me an' mah husbin' been R'publicuns fur thurty years but no mower. We're votin' Dimacrat all the way cuz Kin Starr is gone too far ...I'm going to recycle my summary of the "transitional" question from an earlier thread. One size fits all creationists.