Dinosaurs from Charente Take Over the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution

Paris – 18 July 2026: A journey begins at the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution for which no train timetable applies: the new exhibition “In the Footsteps of Dinosaurs” takes visitors back 140 million years, to the Early Cretaceous period. Since 16 July, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes has been displaying fossils and research findings from Angeac-Charente, between Angouleme and Cognac.

The site in Charente has been investigated in summer excavation campaigns since 2010. What was preserved there beneath a former floodplain is far more than a collection of impressive bones. Plant remains, turtles, crocodiles and dinosaurs together form a picture of an ancient habitat whose richness is particularly revealing for European research.

Ornithomimosaurs also take centre stage: agile, bird-like theropods whose long necks and powerful hind legs recall ostriches. Their scientific name roughly means “bird mimics”. The discoveries from Angeac-Charente make it possible to view this little-known group of dinosaurs not as isolated creatures, but as part of an entire community.

Turiasaurus, meanwhile, evokes dimensions that make even the word “large” seem somewhat inadequate. This long-necked sauropod was among Europe’s largest dinosaurs. Its bones made Angeac-Charente widely known, yet the exhibition thankfully resists the temptation of a mere contest of size: it asks about food, landscape and the relationships between species.

This is precisely where the appeal of the Paris exhibition route lies. The museum does not merely display finished exhibits, but conveys the patient work behind every insight: uncovering, sorting and interpreting traces that are often tiny. Fossilised droppings, known in specialist terminology as coprolites, provide clues to the animals’ diets and turn an artefact into a narrative of past life.

The exhibition was conceived by the Musee d’Angouleme and expanded for Paris with holdings from the Muséum. Illustrations by comic artist Mazan accompany the scientific objects. This combination of excavated material and drawn imagination lends the subject a sense of lightness without disguising the evidence. It is a reminder that palaeontology always works between precise observation and cautious imagination.

For the Muséum, the show is therefore more than a summer attraction for families. It brings a French excavation site to the heart of the capital and shows how open-ended the story of dinosaurs still is. Angeac-Charente tells not of a distant world of monsters, but of a diverse ecosystem – and of science progressing layer by layer.