Star Tyrannosaur

The story behind the long narrow snout of Alioramus remains quite unsolved and a little bit conjectural. The purpose of such a snout clearly has an embedded purpose and we have certainly entertained many interesting and educated guesses/hypotheses during this week. Alioramus is something of a star also, having had many mentions in many different areas of popular culture. Brian Switek has written about the horned features, that we never covered, in the skull of Alioramus altai. More importantly, in terms of pop culture, the nearly always represented Dinosaur King and Spore video games once again give us pop culture links for our dinosaur of the week. The Spore model is pretty well done actually, even going so far as to include the ridged nasal bones seen in many of the illustrations:

This one dances, so it may be more inaccurate, but... it dances, so really it is also pretty awesome: