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Asked by The LB Bros to Anthony, Cathal, Hannah, Jade, Sallie on 3 Mar 2017.
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Jade Owen answered on 3 Mar 2017:
I’m not sure!
If I were to guess I think the egg came first – dinosaurs hatched out of them and they were around before chickens.
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Sallie Baxendale answered on 6 Mar 2017:
Really good question – I don’t know the answer. There’s am awful lot that we don’t know ……yet.
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Anthony Caravaggi answered on 6 Mar 2017:
That’s an excellent question and the answer depends on your time-scale.
At one point in evolutionary history, there were birds which were evolving towards becoming the chickens we see today. There’s no distinct line separating chickens from not-quite-chickens, but there’s no doubt that the ancestors of chickens also laid eggs. Over time, the animals which emerged from those eggs were more and more chicken-like. In this scenario, the egg came first.
We can take that argument all the way back to the first sexually reproducing organisms – the egg is the origin. But life didn’t begin with eggs, it began with organisms which reproduced by splitting themselves; no eggs were necessary (well, it began way before that, but I’m simplifying). So if we go back far enough, the proto-proto-proto-chicken came first.
The interesting thing about this question is that it has a number of different answers, depending on how you look at it. It’s a question which is often asked as a kind of a joke, but it can be far more interesting and complex than people think.
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Comments
Rupert commented on :
Reptiles laid eggs long before there were flying reptiles or even chickens. So the egg came before the chicken. If you include eggs that aren’t laid then chickens came much much later. Maybe they were shy and felt a bit… chicken