WITHwhite green dinosaurs dominate the center of Villers-sur-Mer. It is as if they were looking at the seaside resort idyll that spreads out in front of them: the beach, which is almost endless at low tide, the pretty houses with their pointed gables and half-timbered houses, the restaurants that protect their outdoor seating from the breeze with tarpaulins.
The presence of the green dinosaur figures is not the only striking feature of the small town in French Normandy. The promenade is adorned with oversized images of fossilized snails.
And if you walk along the beach in the direction of the Falaises des Vaches Noires, a group of rocks that remind some of black cows, you will hear a constant knocking and hammering: fossil collectors tackling the cliffs to find fossilized plants, animals or maybe even one find dinosaur tooth
This is not allowed, as the cliffs are already struggling with erosion. As you can see and hear, many do not comply with the regulations, and apparently there are no controls. But you can also find fossils here without breaking the rules – sometimes they detach from crumbling cliffs and fall down onto the beach, which is why beach walkers often crouch down here.
A dinosaur appeared in the 1990s
However, the prehistoric heritage of this stretch of coast would be worth more than an administrative offense to some amateur paleontologists. After all, you never know if you might make a discovery like the mayor of the village of Conteville, north-east of Le Havre. In 1994, André Dubreuil noticed strange bones in a quarry during municipal works. He secured part of a skull and several ribs and notified the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
It was to take four years before official excavations began. But they unearthed a small sensation: a five-meter-tall carnivore from the Middle Jurassic, which was reconstructed from two thousand fragments. It is named in honor of the finder Dubreuillosaurus.
Exhibit in the Paleospace of Villers-sur-Mer
What: Paleospace, Villers-sur-mer
After the Parisian museum initially incorporated the fossil remains into its own collection, the preserved dinosaur skeleton has been at home for a number of years in the Palaeontological Museum Paléospace in Villers-sur-Mer, which opened in 2011, together with two other of the largest prehistoric Norman carnivores and herbivores, the Streptospondylus and the Lexovisaurus.
The three are exhibited in the company of smaller contemporaries and are so skilfully illuminated that, despite the reduction to the skeleton, they appear amazingly real.
The prime meridian on the promenade of Villers-sur-Mer
Around 60,000 visitors per year look at the museum, which is well worth seeing and also has a planetarium, but above all it depicts prehistory. It explains how an animal becomes a fossil, why swimming primeval creatures are usually not dinosaurs but marine reptiles, how to prepare a fossil and, by the way, what the Greenwich or prime meridian is all about.
Villers-sur-Mer is not only a prehistoric treasure trove, the town with 2600 inhabitants is also the northernmost place in mainland Europe through which the prime meridian runs – a vertical semicircle on the globe connecting the north and south poles and at right angles to the equator stands.
Seagulls on the beach at Villers-sur-Mer
Quelle: picture alliance / DUMONT Bildarchiv
This imaginary line is drawn on the ground on the promenade and explained in the museum. With a throne made of fossils and stone from around 1900, what is possibly the only fossil-based work of art in Europe can be seen here: Ferdinand Postel, an artist and photographer who died in 1917, created the 200-kilogram exhibit. The villa he lived in still stands in the center of Villers-sur-Mer.
If you don’t want to read the boards or can’t read yet, you can get a tablet for the game “Jurassic Quest” in the museum, if you want to know more you can find out more about the work of paleontologists or book an excursion to the cliffs. The dinosaurs have given the small seaside resort, which has long stood in the shadow of its more glamorous neighbors Deauville and Cabourg, a unique selling point on the Côte Fleurie, the flower coast.
Dinosaurs and D-Day compete for attention
Not everyone likes the fact that primeval treasures are not preserved well enough here and fossil collectors carve them out of the stone despite bans. “I wish the cliffs would be protected like the English Jurassic Coast,” says Laurent Picot, scientific director of Paléospace, and looks wistfully out to sea.
The paleontologist comes from the Normandy coastal town of Granville, he taught and researched in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and has been working at Paléospace since 2009, where he was involved in the conception before the opening. He also personally leads tours of the museum and the Falaises des Vaches Noires.
Fossils can be seen in the rocks
What: picture alliance / Gilles Targat/Photo12
Around 150 kilometers of the coast of Dorset and East Devon on the other side of the English Channel have been UNESCO World Heritage Sites since 2001. “But for us, it’s always about the WWII landing beaches, the Impressionists and the Bayeux Tapestry,” says Picot. The world-famous tapestry, embroidered in the 11th century and depicting the conquest of England by Norman Duke Wilhelm over a length of 68 meters, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; it can be viewed in its own museum in Bayeux.
The Dinosaur Coast has no comparable title even in prospect. Picot does not receive support for his request from the department’s tourism associations. Rather, there are efforts from this side to have the beaches, on which the Allies landed in 1944 to fight against the German occupiers, recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site – “but despite all their historical significance, they really do not represent any cultural heritage,” says picot.
Houses fell from the cliffs on the coast
In fact, the cultural authority of the United Nations also has doubts as to whether scenes of historical conflicts are worthy of an award and does not want to give priority to the Normans’ application.
Laurent Picot shakes his head and looks down. In addition to rocks, shells and fossils, the sea at low tide also reveals pieces of red brick – remains of houses that have fallen off the cliffs over time. The ruins of a disco, which opened in 1975 and where people danced with a view of the sea, proves on its cliff that in the end nothing can defy the forces of nature.
Built close to the water: Erosion has already been the undoing of some houses
What: picture alliance / Gilles Targat/Photo12
The Tanzpalast closed as early as the 1980s and gradually disappeared into the abyss. Scientists have now set up a measuring station below the remaining walls. It is intended to help find out whether or to what extent climate change is promoting erosion on the coast.
But it is above all the tides and storm waves that change the coast again and again. It’s important to keep an eye on them whenever you walk along the beach, as the sea and cliffs leave very little room for pedestrians at high tide. After all, the regular tidal range here is six meters. Only when the water recedes do beach walkers have the chance to discover fossilized remains from prehistoric times in addition to shells and rocks.
Source: Infographic WORLD
Tips and information for Normandy
Getting there: For example by train via Paris to Deauville. There are rental car companies at the train station, but you can also get to Villers-sur-Mer by bus in around 20 minutes.
Accommodation: The friendly boutique hotel “Hôtel Outre-Mer” is right on the beach near the dinosaur figure and has a particularly beautiful breakfast room, double room from 88 euros (hoteloutremer.com). The four-star hotel “Domaine de Villers & Spa” in an old manor house is elegant with an attractive bar and a very good in-house restaurant, double rooms from 150 euros (domainedevillers.com).
see dinosaurs: In March, the Paléospace Museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and is open again every day from April. Admission costs 8.90 euros (concessions: 6.90 euros), a guided tour to the Falaises des Vaches Noires 8.50 euros (7.50 euros), paleospace-villers.fr
Eat and drink well: About 500 meters from the coast and close to the Paleontological Museum is the very good restaurant “La Terrasse du Marais” (de.normandie-tourisme.fr/restaurants/la-terrasse-du-marais). In nearby Varaville, the Au Pied des Marais restaurant has fabulous oysters and fish dishes, but also vegetarian options (aupieddesmarais.fr).
Further information: German-language information for holidaymakers is available at de.normandie-tourisme.fr and de.france.fr, current Corona rules can be found at auswaertiges-amt.de
Participation in the trip was supported by Normandy Tourism. You can find our standards of transparency and journalistic independence at go2.as/independence.
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Source: WORLD / Sebastian Struwe