• Question: wat came 1st the chicken or the egg?

    Asked by stupidsausage to Adam, Joanna, Louise S, Louise W, Marcus on 12 Nov 2012. This question was also asked by ionam.
    • Photo: Marcus Wilson

      Marcus Wilson answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      apparantly the chicken! but we’re still not sure.

      A couple of years ago scientists in sheffield identified a crical protein that makes egg shells hard, in the mothers ovary. They concluded that the shell wouldnt exist unless it had been grown inside the mother chicken. So back in evolution there were birds that didnt have hard skinned eggs.

      This explains how chickens came first but the critcal protein is missing from other birds and reptiles, so the jurys still out!

    • Photo: Adam Paige

      Adam Paige answered on 12 Nov 2012:

      Marcus has given a good response to this, in reference to a chickens egg (hard shell etc). However, there are other kinds of egg such as the ovum – the egg cell in women that all humans are born from. So whatever the chicken evolved from (I believe birds are thought to have evolved from reptiles?) would have had eggs too – but maybe egg cells not the hard shelled “make an omelette” kind of eggs. In which case, you could argue that egg cells would have been around long before the species evolved into a chicken!

Comments