From http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html#protoavis
Protoavis
Some people like to claim that the finding of a fossil bird from the Triassic of Texas (Protavis) proves that Archae cannot be transitional between dinosaurs and birds because Protoavis predates Archae by 75 million years. This is, of course, errant nonsense, mainly because no one is claiming that Archae is the transitional species between dinosaurs and birds, merely that Archae represents a grade of organisation which the proposed lineage went through to get from dinosaurs to birds. Archae is, I'm sorry to say, out on a limb, evolutionarily speaking. It represents a side branch, useful for comparative purposes, but not in the thick of things. So even if there were birds in the Triassic, that fact would not diminish Archae's importance as an indicator that "yes, birds could have evolved from dinosaurs."
However, notice the "if" in the previous sentence. There are major problems with Protoavis. On the Chatterjee (1991) interpretation, Ostrom (1991) has this to say [my paraphrase]: The only published material from the fossil is a monograph in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. However, this only describes the head. This is badly crushed and all the pieces have been extracted from the matrix, rendering precise placement of the pieces open to question. The description is done from an avian viewpoint, with no counterview (e.g. is this a dinosaur?) used. The skull is so badly crushed that diagnostic features are not preserved. Therefore the published material does not support the view that this is a bird. Indeed a viewing of the fossil by Ostrom (in admittedly less than ideal surroundings) showed that the diagnostic features which could identify the fossil either way are badly crushed and it is doubtful whether any definitive statement could be supported by the fossil. It may be a bird, it may not.
Please note that this questioning of Protoavis as a bird is no "it can't be a bird because it predates Archae" evilutionist backlash. As has been pointed out, even if it is a bird, it does not detract from the evolutionary importance of Archae.
Also please note that feathered dinosaur fossils have been found that would, in the past, have caused them to be questionably classified as birds. Because of the poor condition of the Protoavis fossil and the level of dis-articulation, some paleontologists now believe Protoavis to be another dino with birdlike features. What can be discerned from the fossil show Protoavis to be closer to dino than modern birds.
"In 1984 an international Archaeoptyrex conference was held in Eichstatt, Bavaria to evaluate the official status of the fossil. The consensus of the evolutionary scientists present was that Archaeoptyrex was a bird that could fly, but not necassrily the ancestor for modern birds."
You need to 'bone' up on your knowledge of what constitutes a transitional. A transitional shares diagnostic features with one organism and other diagnostic features with a different organism. Although flying isn't diagnostic, it still fits in with the shared features.
And as I mention in another post, taxonomy has no place for transitionals so they had to place Archy in either bird or reptile and because of the ability to fly and the feathers, placing within 'bird' was more sensible. That does not mean that it is and only is a bird.
If an animal has feathers, it is arguably a bird, and nothing else, by Linnnaean definition.
When it comes done to it, that is the basis for all Creationist claims that "Archaeoptyrex was just a bird", becsuase anything other view would mean accepting transitional forms, and evolution.