Toronto Raptors lead the NBA in hungry mascots

If nothing else, the Toronto Raptors can claim to be winning the race to develop cheerleader-devouring dinosaurs. In a video that went viral last month, the team’s mascot ingests one of the Dance Pak performers as she tries to stand defiantly in front of him. “[The Raptor] ate me and then spit out a man,” the cheerleader told Maclean’s. The crowd remains surprisingly nonplussed.

The costume is a fan-powered airhead with a Velcro mouth designed by Robert Boudwin, who also conceived of Air Clutch, the Houston Rockets’ bear mascot, who also has a sweet tooth for cheerleaders. Air Raptor and Air Clutch remain the only two inflatable mascots in the NBA, but with their YouTube videos getting upwards of 2.5 million views, the costumes could become a trend, forever complicating stereotype-based headlines. “Airhead gobbles airhead” is a bit misleading, if not uninformative.

• Raptor devours cheerleader [Maclean’s]