  A large position angle misalignment between the stellar bar and the
distribution of dust in the late-type barred spiral NGC 3488 was discovered,
using mid-infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and optical images
from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The angle between the bar and dust
patterns was measured to be 25+-2deg, larger than most of the misalignments
found previously in barred systems based on Ha or HI/CO observations. The
stellar bar is bright at optical and 3.6um, while the dust pattern is more
prominent in the 8um band but also shows up in the SDSS u and g-band images,
suggesting a rich interstellar medium environment harboring ongoing star
formation. This angular misalignment is unlikely to have been caused by
spontaneous bar formation. We suggest that the stellar bar and the dust pattern
may have different formation histories, and that the large misalignment was
triggered by a tidal interaction with a small companion. A statistical analysis
of a large sample of nearby galaxies with archival Spitzer data indicates that
bar structure such as that seen in NGC 3488 is quite rare in the local
Universe.
