Question 1

How do you say Albertonectes?

Accepted Answer

You say it like this: al-BER-toe-NEK-teez. Break it into four chunks: al, then BER (stress this part the most), then toe, then NEK-teez. A good memory trick is to say 'Al Berto NECK-tease,' as if you are teasing someone named Al Berto about their neck. Once you have it, it rolls off the tongue pretty easily for such a long word.

Question 2

What does Albertonectes mean?

Accepted Answer

Albertonectes means Alberta swimmer. The Alberta part comes from the Canadian province where the fossil was found, and that province was named after Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, daughter of Queen Victoria. The nectes part comes from the ancient Greek word nektes, which simply means swimmer. So the full name is a tribute to both the location of discovery and the animal's life in the sea.

Question 3

How many neck bones did Albertonectes have?

Accepted Answer

Albertonectes had 76 neck vertebrae, which is the highest number ever recorded for any animal in the history of life on Earth. For context, a giraffe only has 7 neck bones, and even a human has just 7 as well. Even Elasmosaurus, the famous long-necked plesiosaur, only had around 72. Albertonectes blows every other animal out of the water, literally and figuratively.

Question 4

Was Albertonectes a dinosaur?

Accepted Answer

No, Albertonectes was not a dinosaur. It was a plesiosaur, a completely different group of reptiles that lived in the ocean while dinosaurs dominated the land. Plesiosaurs were air-breathing marine reptiles with flippers instead of legs and long necks built for hunting in the sea. They are not closely related to dinosaurs, though they did live at the same time during the Mesozoic Era.

Question 5

Where was Albertonectes found?

Accepted Answer

Albertonectes was discovered near Lethbridge, in the province of Alberta, Canada. The fossil came from the Bearpaw Formation, a rock layer that preserves the remains of creatures that lived in the Western Interior Seaway, the shallow inland sea that covered much of central North America during the Late Cretaceous period. The first specimen was found in 2007 and a possible second specimen turned up at the same site in 2015.

Question 6

What did Albertonectes eat?

Accepted Answer

Albertonectes was a carnivore that almost certainly ate fish, squid-like cephalopods, and other soft-bodied sea creatures. Its teeth were conical and interlocking, which are ideal for gripping slippery prey and stopping it from escaping. Scientists think its extraordinarily long neck may have worked like a fishing rod, allowing Albertonectes to sweep its small head quietly through schools of fish before they realized a predator was nearby.

Question 7

How big was Albertonectes?

Accepted Answer

Albertonectes was about 36 feet long, roughly 11 meters, which is similar in length to a school bus. A large portion of that length was pure neck. Its body was barrel-shaped and compact, and its tail was relatively short, so the neck truly dominated its silhouette. It likely weighed somewhere around 4,400 pounds, or about 2,000 kilograms, making it a very large and imposing ocean predator.

Question 8

When was Albertonectes officially named?

Accepted Answer

The fossil was discovered in 2007, but the official scientific description naming it Albertonectes vanderveldei was published in 2012, five years later. This kind of gap is common in paleontology because preparing fossils, studying them in detail, comparing them to other species, and publishing a peer-reviewed paper takes a long time. The species was described by paleontologists F. Robin O'Keefe and Luis M. Chiappe, who confirmed it as a new and record-breaking member of the family Elasmosauridae.

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