Museum d'Histoire Naturelle

Natural history museum strong on Provencal dinosaur eggs

Address Parc Saint-Mitre, 13100 Aix-en-Provence

The Museum d'Histoire Naturelle is a small but charming natural history museum, currently housed in the Parc Saint-Mitre after a move from its long-time home in the Hotel Boyer d'Eguilles. The collections cover Provencal geology, paleontology, and zoology, with the dinosaur eggs of Mont Sainte-Victoire as the headline exhibit.

It is the kind of museum where you can spend half an hour or two hours and feel time has been well spent. Excellent for children, with stuffed Provencal wildlife — wild boar, eagle owl, lynx — and a hall of minerals lit up like jewels. Free entry on the first Sunday of every month.

things to do museum
A story
Aix sits on one of the richest deposits of fossilised dinosaur eggs in the world — the chalky limestone of Mont Sainte-Victoire was a swampy lowland in the late Cretaceous, and dozens of intact eggs and clutches were collected by local geologists from the 1940s onwards. The museum displays the best of them.

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