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Not so many years ago one could count the number of dinosaur eggs that had been dug up in Mongolia and the Dakotas on one hand. Had they not been fossilized, they’d have made a large omelet.

Then Raymond Dughi, the curator of the Museum of Natural History in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence, discovered an entire cemetery of dinosaur eggs, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Many of them, of every size and shape, some resembling a football, lay barely buried in the red clay earth beneath the Mont Sainte Victoire in Provence, a mountain immortalized by Cézanne in many paintings. Dughi immortalized the dinosaur egg cemetery for fellow paleontologists.

At first Dughi told no one about his extraordinary discovery. He took several eggs back to his laboratory in Aix-en-Provence to examine the shells. His object was to try to come up with an explanation for the sudden disappearance of dinosaurs from the earth. Meanwhile, a local schoolteacher had unearthed a dinosaur egg in her garden. As she was likely to report her find to an eminent paleontologist in Paris, Dughi saw himself about to be deprived of his scientific “scoop.” So he hastened to submit numerous reports and papers describing his find to the Academy of Science. This insured his fame.

It also attracted any reporter who followed communications to the Academy. I did and went to Aix and persuaded Dughi to show me “his” cemetery of dinosaur eggs. My credibility was clearly established when I pointed out that Tyrannosaurus Ress was my ancestor. Admittedly not a direct line as it was interrupted by Oedipus Ress. In any event the sight of such a huge number of dinosaur eggs overwhelmed me.

“If I were you,” I urged Dughi, “I’d have the name of your city changed to ‘Eggs-en-Provence.’ ”

Several weeks later I received a call from a former colleague on the Paris Herald, Roy McMullen. “I see you’ve been in Aix-en-Provence lately,” he said. “How do you know?” I asked, since I had not yet written anything about it. McMullen explained, “I saw an article in Le Monde by a French reporter who had gone to Aix to see the cemetery. Raymond Dughi told him that he was not the first journalist to visit. There had been an American reporter who had suggested changing the name of the city to Eggs-en-Provence. It was obvious to me that only you would make such a terrible pun.”

Paul Ress is an American writer and journalist based in Geneva. This is an extract from Shaggy Dog Tales, his book of anecdotes from his "58½ years of reportage," is available from www.xlibris.com, or from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.