The race is on to save Europe’s richest site of fossil dinosaur eggs,
on the Sainte-Victoire mountain near Aix-en-Provence in southern France.
The regional council, which owns a large tract of mountainside where there
are hundreds of eggs, has asked the environment ministry to classify the
site as a geological reserve.
Fossil hunters have plagued the area since the first eggs were discovered
120 years ago. American collectors call the site ‘Eggs-en-Provence’. But
the threat to the fossils increased enormously in 1989, when a huge forest
fire swept across the mountain, laying bare previously inaccessible areas
which had been covered with thick undergrowth, and exposing the eggs. Nadine
Gomez, the geologist in charge of protecting the site, complains that the
deposits of dinosaur eggs are even marked on geological maps ‘on sale in
all bookshops’.
Geologists want the eggs left in situ so that they can establish which
species of dinosaur used the site and what their laying habits were. Surprisingly,
there are scarcely any dinosaur bones on the mountain. This has led to suggestions
that female dinosaurs of 70 million years ago came to what was then a low-lying
marshy area, specifically to lay their eggs. Floods are thought to have
smothered the eggs in sediment.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
