(NOTE: I'm not looking for a font ID of this font, this is cropped from a picture I just saw and is the first and only time I've ever seen this)

Looks like someone just typed an underscore over the q.

I don't think so, Chris. The bar is too narrow and too carefully balanced on the stem to be an underscore.

I can't say I've seen it in a typeface, but that's the standard handwritten 'q' here in Norway, and I guess the other Nordic countries too.

Edit: Or at least that's how we learnt to write 'q's in the 70s. No idea if it's still taught like that.

Some people do this in handwriting because it helps differentiate q from g. Scroll through a MyFonts search for "casual script" and see how many you can spot. Look also for the variant where the crossing stroke leads up to start the u.

Yeah I doubt it's an underscore, knowing the source of this pic, it's just really hard to believe the "designers" would have taken the time to do something like that.

Anybody know when this first appeared? Any scribal instances of it?

Cerulean: Or from 9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_handwriting_variation

Recent example from Norway:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nR1srWAslfo/TwY0p-ET_pI/AAAAAAAACqc/X5Wq7ESGj3...

I've written lowercase q with a crossed descender since I was in college, and that's a long damn time. I can't remember anyone teaching me to make q's that way, but I surely didn't invent it. I either saw it printed that way, or saw it in someone else's handwriting. I picked up the habit of crossing my 7's (considered an affectation here in the US) from a friend of mine around the same time, and maybe he crossed his q's too.

And here's Nicholas Jenson, with a crossed p, as a sign of elision, I think.

http://www.noamberg.com/thesis/blowrg/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/origina...

as a sign of elision

Specifically, an abbreviation for per.

It's very standard in written Spanish (Spain, at least) to cross the q in handwriting, though it drives my (American) students crazy. It was used in printing as an abbreviation for cuan or cual at one point but that was several centuries ago.