Dinosaur eggs found in their thousands found hy

TOM WILKIE

A huge dinosaur rookery, containing more than 300,000 dinosaur eggs, has been discovered in the French Pyrenees.

Researchers from France and Spain have found huge numbers of egg-shell fragments, intact eggs and tiny smashed bones - probably belonging to baby dinosaurs - in an area that was once an ancient sea shore.

The discovery is the first unambiguous evidence of land-living dinosaurs nesting at a sea shore. The creatures which laid the eggs have not yet been identified, but the remains may well be more than 100 million years old.

In one outcrop, the team of palaeontologists found 24 fossilised dinosaur nests. Each nest contained between one and seven eggs and was separated from its neighbour by about 2.5 metres.

In this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature, J L Sanz from the palaeontology department of the Universidad Autonoma of Madrid, and colleagues, speculate that the area may have been an habitual nesting ground. "The dinosaurs may have returned to this same area during several reproductive seasons," they suggest.