by AFP
Experts come once a year to search a new part of the reserve, with the location always kept secret to deter pillagers. Christophe SIMON / AFP
At the foot of Sainte Victoire, the mountain in Provence immortalised by Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, a palaeontologist brushes meticulously through a mound of red clay looking for fossils.
These are not any old fossils, but 75-million-year-old dinosaur eggs.
Little luck or skill is needed to find them: scientists believe that there are more dinosaur eggs here than at any other place on Earth.
The area, closed to the public, is nicknamed "Eggs en Provence", due to its proximity to the southeastern city of Aix en Provence.
"There's no other place like it," explained Thierry Tortosa, a palaeontologist and conservationist at the Sainte Victoire Nature Reserve.
"You only need to look down to find fragments. We're literally walking on eggshells here."
Around 1,000 eggs, some of them as big as 30 centimetres (12 inches) in diameter, have been found here in recent years in an area measuring less than a hectare -– a mere dot on a reserve that will span 280 hectares once it is doubled in size by 2026 to prevent pillaging.
"We reckon we've got about one egg per square metre (11 square feet). So there are thousands, possibly millions, here," Tortosa told AFP.
"Eggs" is not in the business of competing with other archaeological sites -– even though Tortosa finds the "world record" of 17,000 dinosaur eggs discovered in Heyuan, China, in 1996 vaguely amusing.
"We're not looking to dig them up because we're in a nature reserve and we can't just alter the landscape. We wait until they're uncovered by erosion," he said.
"Besides, we don't have enough space to store them all. We just take those that are of interest from a palaeontology point of view."
Holy Grail
Despite the plethora of eggs on site, the scientists still have mysteries to solve.
Those fossils found so far have all been empty, either because they were not fertilised or because the chick hatched and waddled off.
"Until we find embryos inside -– that's the Holy Grail -- we won't know what kind of dinosaur laid them. All we know is that they were herbivores because they're round," said Tortosa.
Fossilised dinosaur embryos are rarer than hen's teeth.
Palaeontologists discovered a tiny fossilised Oviraptorosaur that was at least 66 million years old in Ganzhou, China, around the year 2000.
But Tortosa remains optimistic that "Eggs" holds its own Baby Yingliang.
"Never say never. In the nine years that I've been here, we've discovered a load of stuff we never thought we'd find."
Which is why experts come once a year to search a new part of the reserve. The location is always kept secret to deter pillagers.
When AFP visited, six scientists were crouched under camouflage netting in a valley lost in the Provencal scrub, scraping over a few square metres of clay-limestone earth, first with chisels, then with pointy-tipped scribers.
"There's always something magical -- like being a child again -- when you find an egg or a fossilised bone," specialist Severine Berton told AFP.
Unique
Their "best" finds -– among the thousands they have dug up -- include a small femur and a 30-centimetre-long tibia-fibula. They are thought to come from a Rhabdodon or a Titanosaur -- huge herbivores who roamed the region.
In the Cretaceous period (89-66 million years BCE), the Provencal countryside's then-flooded plains and silty-clayey soils offered ideal conditions for dinosaurs to graze and nest, and perfect conditions to conserve the eggs for millennia.
The region, which stretched from what is now Spain to the Massif Central mountains of central France formed an island that was home to several dinosaur species found nowhere else in the world.
Alongside the endemic herbivores were carnivores such as the Arcovenator and the Variraptor, a relative of the Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame.
In 1846, French palaeontologist Philippe Matheron found the world's first fossilised dinosaur egg in Rognac, around 30 kilometres from Eggs.
Since then, museums from across the world have dispatched people to Provence on egg hunts. Everyone, it seems, wants a bit of the omelette.
Despite efforts to stop pillaging, problems persist, such as when a wildfire uncovered a lot of fossils in 1989 and "everyone came egg collecting", Tortosa said.
The region, which stretched from what is now Spain to the Massif Central mountains of central France formed an island that was home to several dinosaur species found nowhere else in the world.
Alongside the endemic herbivores were carnivores such as the Arcovenator and the Variraptor, a relative of the Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame.
In 1846, French palaeontologist Philippe Matheron found the world's first fossilised dinosaur egg in Rognac, around 30 kilometres from Eggs.
Since then, museums from across the world have dispatched people to Provence on egg hunts. Everyone, it seems, wants a bit of the omelette.
Despite efforts to stop pillaging, problems persist, such as when a wildfire uncovered a lot of fossils in 1989 and "everyone came egg collecting", Tortosa said.
"Any other place would set up an entire museum just to show off a single tooth."
dac/so/ol/gil/bc
Reference
Provided by AFP
※ Picks respects the rights of all copyright holders. If you do wish to make material edits, you will need to run them by the copyright holder for approval.
more from
AFP
How to move a rhino
AFP
'Third-ever confirmed interstellar object blazing through Solar System'
AFP
Facing climate change, Swiss trees get mist before they're missed
AFP
'Frogging' takes off in Borneo's jungle
The Conversation
'Completely unexpected': Antarctic sea ice may be in terminal decline due to rising Southern Ocean salinity
AFP
'Japan had hottest June on record: weather agency'
Knowable Magazine
'The surprisingly tricky art of seed banking'
AllblancTV
Super Sweat Fullbody Cardio HIIT (Part 1/2)
AFP
'Southern Europe roasts as temperatures soar'
AFP
Germany swelters as European heatwave moves eastwards
AFP
Sri Lanka counts seven million crop-busting monkeys
AFP
Dying breed: Tunisian dog lovers push to save age-old desert hound
Share TodayStory content on social media.
Go Home
Go to channel