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You need all the proto birds you can get. Why shoot this one down?

Your objections are relentlessly unscientific. It needs evidence. When there's evidence for it, it flies, whether it poses problems or not. Right now it looks like Chatterjee has a Triassic chimera, or a vaguely bird-like Triassic theropod.

Still there is an incredible lack of evidence to support avian evolution and no logical reason for them to evolve.

In theory lack of evidence bothers you, except you uncritically accept Protoavis, the bone-pile jigsaw puzzle. All those fantastically preserved fossils we have, however, are to be regarded with suspicion. Why do you (and Dataman, et. al) weigh the information content of fossils upside-down from their clarity?

Unless you are going to stick with the Type R High performance road handling story. What is interesting about the feathers is that there are plenty of example of flying reptiles that flew quite well without feathers and yet for reasons only known to Darwin, Archaeopteryx pops up out of nowhere with perfectly functional avian type feathers.

Huh?

In light of the chicanery with Archaeoraptor liaoningensis out of China I wouldn't put much stock in your picture of Caudipteryx xoui.

The pictures I posted were of a probable juvenile Sinornithosaurus. Ichneumon posted some good Caudipteryx shots here. There's more than one feathered dinosaur. Apparently, all you read are creationist tracts on ICR (or AiG or TrueOrigins), a limitation which will keep you pig-ignorant in these discussions forever.

As far as Archaeoraptor goes, mainstream science caught it in two months. When creationists start screaming that everything is Piltdown Man, they're whipped. You might just as well rethink as dream you're scoring with that cop-out.

However I suppose you need all the help you can get. The question is where are all the feathered reptiles today?

They diversified.

Did they all become birds?

I suppose some lines went extinct.

One would expect that evolution being mostly random forces that we should still have plenty of them around today.

We do.

Methinks BP is making a common assumption here in regards to feathered dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were not true reptiles. There is strong evidence they were warm blooded or sem-warm blooded. Reptiles are cold blooded. The flying reptiles BP refers to were the pterosaurs. However, they may not have been true reptiles either, as there is strong evidence they were fur covered, which indicates they also required insulation. The feathered dinosaurs gave rise to modern birds (feathers originated for insulation purposes, not flying; they were simply adapted for the latter). The truly-flying reptiles (to distinguish them from gliding reptiles, which can be found even today) went extinct, possibly out-competed by the early birds.