Eggs en Provence: France's unique dinosaur egg trove
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,' said 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 as big as 30 centimetres 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. 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.'
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.
Advertisement
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.'french hi
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.
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 herbivores were carnivores such as the Arcovenator and the Variraptor, a relative of the Velociraptor, of
Jurassic Park
fame.
Advertisement
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.
Five years later the site was designated a national geological nature reserve, closed to the public – the highest level of protection available.
The regional authorities are now mulling over ways to develop 'palaeontology tourism', a move Tortosa applauds.
'France is the only country in the world that doesn't know how to promote its dinosaurs,' Tortosa said. 'Any other place would set up an entire museum just to show off a single tooth.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
4 days ago
- France 24
Peruvian citadel that is nearly 4,000 years old opens doors to tourists
The archaeological site, known as Penico, was a meeting point for trade between the first human communities on the Pacific coast and those from the Andes and Amazon regions, researchers have said. Located in the Supe valley, some 110 miles (180 kilometers) north of the Peruvian capital Lima and around 12 miles from the Pacific ocean, Penico was a hilly landscape before exploration work began in 2017. Archaeologists believe it could hold insights into why the Caral civilization -- which flourished between 3,000 and 1,800 BC -- faded. At the opening ceremony, artists from the region played pututus -- the traditional shell trumpets -- during an ancestral ritual offering to the Pachamama, Mother Earth, consisting of agricultural products, coca leaves and local drinks. Penico was an "organized urban center devoted to agriculture and trade between the coast, the mountains and the forest," archaeologist Ruth Shady, who leads research on the site, told AFP. The site itself dates back to between 1,800 and 1,500 BC, she added. It was built on a geological terrace 2000 feet (600 meters) above sea level, parallel to a river to avoid flooding. Research carried out by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture has identified 18 constructions, including buildings and residential complexes. Researchers believe that it was built at the same time as the first civilizations in the Middle East and Asia. Shady said researchers are hoping the site can shed light on the crisis they think helped hasten the end of the Caral civilization. This crisis, she said, was linked to climatic changes that led to droughts and affected agricultural activities in the region. "We want to understand how the Caral civilization formed and developed over time, and how it came to be in crisis as a result of climate change," she added. © 2025 AFP
France 24
7 days ago
- France 24
Humanoid robot says not aiming to 'replace human artists'
The ultra-realistic robot, one of the most advanced in the world, is designed to resemble a human woman with an expressive, life-like face, large hazel eyes and brown hair cut in a bob. The arms though are unmistakably robotic, with exposed metal, and can be swapped out depending on the art form it is practicing. Late last year, Ai-Da's portrait of English mathematician Alan Turing became the first artwork by a humanoid robot to be sold at auction, fetching over $1 million. But as Ai-Da unveiled its latest creation -- an oil painting entitled "Algorithm King", conceived using artificial intelligence -- the humanoid insisted the work's importance could not be measured in money. "The value of my artwork is to serve as a catalyst for discussions that explore ethical dimensions to new technologies," the robot told AFP at Britain's diplomatic mission in Geneva, where the new portrait of King Charles will be housed. The idea, Ai-Da insisted in a slow, deliberate cadence, was to "foster critical thinking and encourage responsible innovation for more equitable and sustainable futures". 'Unique and creative' Speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations' AI for Good summit, Ai-Da, who has done sketches, paintings and sculptures, detailed the methods and inspiration behind the work. "When creating my art, I use a variety of AI algorithms," the robot said. "I start with a basic idea or concept that I want to explore, and I think about the purpose of the art. What will it say?" The humanoid pointed out that "King Charles has used his platform to raise awareness on environmental conservation and interfaith dialog. I have aimed this portrait to celebrate" that, it said, adding that "I hope King Charles will be appreciative of my efforts". Aidan Meller, a specialist in modern and contemporary art, led the team that created Ai-Da in 2019 with artificial intelligence specialists at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham. He told AFP that he had conceived the humanoid robot -- named after the world's first computer programmer Ada Lovelace -- as an ethical arts project, and not "to replace the painters". Ai-Da agreed. There is "no doubt that AI is changing our world, (including) the art world and forms of human creative expression", the robot acknowledged. But "I do not believe AI or my artwork will replace human artists". Instead, Ai-Da said, the aim was "to inspire viewers to think about how we use AI positively, while remaining conscious of its risks and limitations". Asked if a painting made by a machine could really be considered art, the robot insisted that "my artwork is unique and creative". © 2025 AFP
AFP
09-07-2025
- AFP
Joe Rogan misleads on 'climate cooling' in Bernie Sanders interview
"Did you see the Washington Post piece that they wrote?" Rogan said in the June 24, 2025 episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," one of the most-streamed podcasts in the United States (archived here). "Essentially, they found that we're in a cooling period, that the Earth over the past X amount of years, and this was, like, a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data, and kudos to them for doing that." Rogan -- whose show has frequently amplified misinformation on health, politics and climate change -- was referencing a September 19, 2024 article in the Washington Post about a scientific effort to map the history of Earth's climate over the past 485 million years (archived here). Multiple accounts shared the clip across platforms in late June, gathering millions of views. "NEW: Joe Rogan fact checks Senator Bernie Sanders after he tried shaming people who think Climate Change is a hoax," says one such post shared June 24 on X. Image A screenshot of an X post taken on July 3, 2025 But Rogan's interpretation of the research discussed in the article is misleading, scientists including one of the study's co-authors told AFP. The study's findings neither disprove nor question the reality that modern warming is happening at a record pace due to human activity. The 2024 study from paleoclimate research scientist Emily Judd and other researchers, titled "A 485-million-year history of Earth's surface temperature", in fact "highlights the urgency of modern climate change," said Laura Larocca, an assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Ocean Futures (archived here, here and here). "While Earth was much hotter during ancient greenhouse periods, humans have only ever lived during relatively cooler climate phases. Today, the pace of human-driven warming is exceptionally rapid," she told AFP July 3, reiterating a point made clear in the Washington Post article. The newspaper reported that the study "revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized -- offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans." It also emphasized: "At no point in the nearly half-billion years that Judd and her colleagues analyzed did the Earth change as fast as it is changing now." 'Cooling period'? Geological records over hundreds of millions of years show global temperatures have reached both lower and higher levels than those currently observed, but these changes happened extremely slowly in comparison to the modern pace of warming. British scientist Dan Lunt, a co-author of the study, told AFP on July 1 that past phases of warming occurred "so slowly that they are essentially undetectable on the timescale of a human lifetime" (archived here). By contrast, the environmental nonprofit Climate Central have estimated that for Millenials and Gen Z -- which the organization defined as people born between the 1981 and 2012 -- could experience up to two times more warming over the course of their lives than Baby Boomers -- those born between 1948 and 1962 -- under a scenario of medium to high emissions (archived here). Kevin Anchukaitis, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and the spouse of one of the study co-authors, told AFP on July 2 that while humans built civilization during a "relatively cool geological period" in history, modern emissions are rapidly affecting Earth's systems (archived here). Climate models predict warming to continue for decades under all emission scenarios, and the effects of human activities on Earth's climate to date have become irreversible (archived here). Even the most striking examples of warming in ancient climate events do not compare to today's rapid progression, said Gordon Inglis, a postdoctoral research fellow who studies climate-biogeochemistry at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom (archived here). CO2 correlation The study's timeline of the Earth's hot temperature history should in fact provide more reason to worry about climate change, scientists said. Inglis noted that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 56 million years ago and is considered as a rapidly-warming phase in Earth's history, was directly tied to an increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (archived here). He said this phase gives scientists a glimpse of what could happen with the modern climate, as the PETM was associated with global warming, ocean acidification, and at least one major extinction event. The study confirms ties between Earth's temperatures and levels of CO2, explained Anchukaitis. The paper "actually reinforces the primary role that carbon dioxide plays in setting the temperature of the Earth," he told AFP. A report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adds: "It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land" (archived here). Read more of AFP's reporting on climate misinformation and disinformation here.
