Alain Cabot always thought he would find a dinosaur egg. An amateur paleontologist, he knew the reptiles had lived in Provence, in southern France, and in the Pyrenees, in northern Spain. If he looked hard enough in the region between, then surely he would discover a nest.
It took him hundreds of hours, but eventually he proved himself right. In 1995, amid the vineyards near the French town of Montpellier, he stumbled upon a piece of shell that resembled the skin of an avocado. It came from an egg more than 67 million years old."I immediately understood the geology and knew that if I looked in similar places I might find other nests," he said. "It worked every time, but it took me a year and a half to cover the entire nesting ground."
The result is one of the most important troves of dinosaur eggs to come to light anywhere in the world. Cabot, 42, said the only comparable sites are in the Gobi dessert, in Montana in the United States and in nearby Aix-en-Provence.
"I said to myself, `I must be dreaming.' At first, I had to convince myself every day they were real," he said.
Stretching over 10 square miles around the vast Thau pond near Mont-pellier, he has uncovered countless fragments of shells. But because they are of a type never seen before, Cabot can do no more than speculate on the beasts that emerged from them.
"If they were proportional to the eggs, then it would seem as though they were relatively big animals of more than 10 meters (33 feet). But we have no way of proving it unless we find a whole egg with a fetus in it."
With scientists planning to dig deeper into the rock in the belief they will turn up further layers of nests, the prospect of discovering such a fetus is real, according to Cabot.
In the meantime, he hopes to make the most of a site in which the eggs are "exceptionally well preserved," according to Monique Vianey-Liaud, a paleontologist at Montpellier University.
The site near Aix-en-Provence - dubbed "Eggs-en-Provence" by American paleontologists - has enabled scientists to deepen their understanding of the way dinosaurs lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods between 200 million and 65 million years ago. The discovery at Thau pond, which is 90 miles away, is of equal importance, according to Vianey-Liaud.
Thau pond is one of the few parts of Europe where rock dating from Jurassic and Cretaceous ages is still near the Earth's surface. In those times, southern France was a tropical island of dense vegetation and fast running rivers, Cabot says. "There was a multitude of dinosaurs who roamed around in search of food, going as far as northern Spain. But I think they always came back to the same place to nest."
He said the nests he discovered contained several eggs arranged in circles. "Some were at ground level, in the open air. You can see where they have hatched because the top of the shell is broken."
A geologist for whom paleontology is a "passion, not a profession," he said he'll leave the research to Vianey-Liaud. But he is active in proposing methods of conservation and would like to see the area turned into a museum.
Yves Pietrasanta, the mayor of Meze, the village at the center of the nesting ground, is more than happy to comply. "We have planned exhibitions and shows to explain our prehistoric patrimony," he said. "If there is a Jurassic Park in France, it must be in Meze."