France, Jan. 27 -- France's varied geology makes it fertile ground for dinosaur fossil hunters, but many finds have only been unearthed in the last 20 years, with French palaeontologists only recently becoming interested in dinosaurs - and now funding is becoming harder to secure.
Caletodraco cottardi, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived 100 million years ago, was first discovered on a beach in Normandy, northern France, in 2021.
Nicolas Cottard, a science teacher and amateur palaeontologist, was scouring the chalk cliffs around where he lives in Saint-Jouin-Bruneval, and found a large piece of stone with bones in it.
He and a another amateur fossil collector worked on preparing it - cutting out the bones using specialised chisels and micr...