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Alioramini is a clade of long-snouted tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurid dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous epoch. It includes the genera Alioramus and Qianzhousaurus. Although tyrannosaurids are known from a variety of places around the globe, alioramins are restricted to Asia in mostly Maastrichtian strata. Many of the fossils attributed to Alioramini are not from fully developed individuals.
Dinosaur researcher Gregory S. Paul has proposed a potential synonymy between Qianzhousaurus and Alioramus, though others maintain them as separate genera. Alioramini is usually considered to be a part of the Tyrannosaurinae subfamily within the Tyrannosauridae family. This is supported by several features, including a maxillary process of the premaxilla that points upwards; the deep joint surface in the maxilla conceals certain features related to tooth roots; the particular shape of the lacrimal, mostly hidden from view; and an ectopterygoid with a pneumatic recess that possesses a distinctive round or triangular shape. Below is a cladogram showing a basal placement of Alioramini within the Tyrannosaurinae, according to Brusatte & Carr (2016).
In their 2025 description of the non-tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroid Khankhuuluu, Voris et al. (2025) proposed a novel arrangement of tyrannosaurine clades; suggesting that alioramins were a late-diverging clade more closely related to the similarly-aged Tyrannosaurini ( Zhuchengtyrannus, Tarbosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus) than previously recognized. The authors reasoned that previous analyses had over-scored anatomical characters related to shallow skull morphology (a trait more common in non-tyrannosaurids and juvenile tyrannosaurids), which resulted in more basal positions for these species. They recognized seven cranial features that alioramins share with tyrannosaurins to the exclusion of other tyrannosaurines. They further argued that the juvenile-like proportions of alioramins were the result of paedomorphosis, rather than immaturity or being indicative of a basal phylogenetic position. These results are displayed in the cladogram below:
Studies on the morphology of tyrannosauroid skulls suggest that alioramins experienced lower amounts of stress in their skulls when biting and feeding and that they likely did not utilize puncture-and-pull feeding like larger tyrannosaurines such as Tyrannosaurus and Daspletosaurus.
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