A Good Giant Raptor Week

Looks a little naked though

I shared the image I posted with my wife last night. She freaked out. Apparently birds bigger than people are not very appealing to her; admittedly Great-tailed Grackles kind of freak her out with their size, let alone being a bird. For all of her freaking out around birds she does do a great job driving me around to photograph them, but I digress! Giant bird, giant Eumaniraptoran, or smallish dinosaur; whatever way you choose to describe Achillobator, it has been an impressive dinosaur to research and discuss. In terms of popularity out in the world, we have mentioned a small number of popular references already this week. What we have not seen as yet, however, is the video game contributions. Creators in Spore have gone to work making their own Achillobator models; I think this one is the most robust and interesting one to the left here. Additionally, and I find this kind of funny, there is apparently an island in World of Warcraft that has at least one giant dinosaur living on it that will occasionally produce an item called the Achillobator Ring when defeated. That is a different thing to share in terms of pop culture references generally shared on this site! Unfortunately, the popularity of the animal kind of stops there. In 2003 there was a short jolt on the dinosaur mailing list. That has pretty much disappeared from the record though (I found it on page 4 of the Google hits for Achillobator). Tomorrow I think we may start a week that is a little bit more popular, but I can never tell until we get really rolling. Hopefully this week will help Achillobator get some more attention; it is an interesting enough animal to deserve it!