Giraffes, with their beautifully elongated necks, have only seven cervical vertebrae. So do you, and, for that matter, most mammals. (Sloths and manatees are among the few oddballs that differ.) Short or long, mammal necks are typically supported by just seven bones. But other creatures played by different anatomical rules. The fantastic sauropod dinosaurs – such as the familiar Diplodocus and what may have been the largest terrestrial animal ever, Amphicoelias – had a higher number of intricately modified neck vertebrae. One of my favorite dinosaurs, Apatosaurus, had 15 neck vertebrae.

Other prehistoric creatures racked on even more bones. And paleontologists may have just identified the animal with the highest cervical vertebra count of all time. In the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers Tai Kubo, Mark Mitchell, and Donald Henderson describe a new elasmosaur from the roughly 70-million-year-old rock of Alberta, Canada’s Bearpaw Formation. They have named the quad-paddled, long-necked marine reptile Albertonectes vanderveldei, and, while the creature’s skull went missing, the rest of the plesiosaur is represented by a nearly complete skeleton that stretched about 37 feet long in life.

Most of that length was neck. Even though the Albertonectes specimen – designated TMP 2007.011.0001 – folded up on itself prior to fossilization, it is immediately clear that this animal had a wonderfully long neck. When reconstructed, Albertonectes had 76 cervical vertebrae that stretched about 23 feet from the back of the skull to the neck’s base. This barely edges out the nearest competition for cervical count – the more famous Elasmosaurus had 71 neck vertebrae. AndAlbertonectes has also just become the longest elasmosaur we know of. While some of the big-headed, short-necked pliosaurs attained larger sizes – such as the still-unnamed Predator X – Albertonectes sets the new limit for the longest of the long-necked plesiosaurs.