A forgotten set of bird's eggs collected more than a century ago by the father of British mountaineering has been discovered at the Booth Museum in Brighton.

They were picked up by Victorian climber Edward Whymper in Greenland in 1872.

Among the dozen specimens in the collection are eggs of mergansers, owls, ravens and a white-tailed eagle.

The white-tailed eagle was a common sight in the skies of Northern Europe and the Arctic in the 19th Century, but has declined sharply since - partly because of egg collectors.

The Whymper eggs had been forgotten until Bill North, a volunteer archivist at the museum, spotted the climber's name on some of the shells as he was cataloguing a much larger collection.

He said: "I was working through it systematically and came across the eagle egg first. Written on it was 'Collected by Edward Whymper, Greenland'.

"I was excited, it's not a very common name and I wondered if it was the Edward Whymper, so I did a bit of checking and it clearly was.

"I was pretty chuffed, as you can imagine. It was quite distinctive writing on the eggs and I wondered if he had written it himself."

The eggs were part of a huge collection that arrived at the Dyke Road museum from Christ's Hospital school, near Horsham.

Whymper, an illustrator and wood engraver who became smitten with mountaineering, made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, in the Swiss Alps, in 1865. He made trips to Greenland, in 1867 and 1872.

The first was a failed attempt to cross the ice-cap from coast-to-coast; the second included sailing around Disko Island and resulted in a large haul of fossils, rock samples and birds' eggs.

The eggs are now likely to go back into storage because of lack of display space and the museum's policy of not showing eggs.

Jeremy Adams, the museum's assistant keeper of natural sciences, said: "We don't display eggs because it might encourage little boys like Edward Whymper to go out and collect them."

But the information on the museum computer will be available to historians, people interested in birds and those interested in Whymper and the history of mountaineering.