Will the "Dinosauroid" return?

I have to admit that one of my favorite targets of criticism is the "Dinosauroid," which I have previously mentioned on this blog multiple times (with the more detailed treatments here, here, and here). Even though paleontologist Dale Russell and taxidermist Ron Sequin stated that their hypothetical being might bear a little orthogenic bias, it was nonetheless presented a plausible hypothesis of what dinosaurs might have become had they not gone extinct. (Mind you, this predated the consensus that some dinosaurs still exist today; we just call them birds).

Perhaps, but the creature is so overwhelmingly human-like that it is difficult to fathom how the Dinosauroid could be considered a viable scientific hypothesis and not a by-product of a kind of teleological thinking that considers the "humanoid" form to be the pinnacle of evolution. Perhaps it is no small coincidence that the Dinosauroid not only looked like the Sleestaks of Land of the Lost, but many interpretations of extraterrestrial visitors, and it gained some popularity among the true believers of UFO and alien abduction nonsense.

Russell seems to have been somewhat embarrassed by the thought experiment; although he had reasserted that it is a plausible creature, it seems to have generally faded from memory. Now, however, Russell has penned a new book called Islands in the Cosmos (Amazon) to be published next year as part of the "Life of the Past" series by Indiana University Press. Here's the synopsis;

How is it that we came to be here? The search for answers to that question has preoccupied humans for millennia. Scientists have sought clues in the genes of living things, in the physical environments of Earth from mountaintops to the depths of the ocean, in the chemistry of this world and those nearby, in the tiniest particles of matter, and in the deepest reaches of space. In Islands of the Cosmos, Dale A. Russell traces a path from the dawn of the universe to speculations about our future on this planet. He centers his story on the physical and biological processes in evolution, which interact to favor more successful, and eliminate less successful, forms of life. Marvelously, these processes reveal latent possibilities in life's basic structure, and propel a major evolutionary theme: the increasing proficiency of biological function. It remains to be seen whether the human form can survive the dynamic processes that brought it into existence. Yet the emergence of the ability to acquire knowledge from experience, to optimize behavior, to conceptualize, to distinguish "good" from "bad" behavior all hint at an evolutionary outcome that science is only beginning to understand.

I could not help but notice the whiffs of orthogenic, internally-driven evolution and teleology in this summary. It should not be surprising, then, that Simon Conway Morris, champion of "inevitable humans," wrote the forward to this book. Indeed, the book seems set to make a more philosophical point rather than to elucidate details about ancient life (like many of the other books of the "Life of the Past" series), and I will be interested to see if "Troodon sapiens" reappears.