Eggs en Provence: France's unique dinosaur egg trove
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."
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