72-million-year-old dinosaur egg nests discovered

A palaeontologist has made a pretty egg-cellent discovery in France.

Alain Cabot, who owns a dinosaur museum called the Musée Parc des Dinosaures, has found around 100 fossilised dinosaur eggs on its land.

The eggs are about the size of a small melon and are thought to be about 72 million years old.

Alain thinks the eggs might have been laid by titanosaurs - giant herbivore dinosaurs that measured about 15 metres and weighed between 15 and 20 tonnes.

"It's an extraordinary deposit and it will take generations of palaeontologists to study it," Alain Cabot said in an interview with The Times.

"There are millions of eggs in southern France. I think it could be the biggest deposit in the world," he said.

Around a thousand eggs have been discovered in recent years around the Aix-en-Provence region in France - leading palaeontologists to give it the nickname "eggs-en-Provence".

During the late Cretaceous period - when the eggs were laid - the area was part of an island made up of Spain, Portugal and southern France.

Much like turtles and birds do, once the dinosaurs had found a nesting ground that they liked, they would come back to the same location year-after-year to lay eggs.

Alain said the eggs will be kept in the ground on site instead of dug up and sold, and will become part of his Museum where he says they deserve to be seen by the public.