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Which came first egg or hen?
Eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs: that’s the basis of this ancient riddle. But eggs – which are just female sex cells – evolved more than a billion years ago, whereas chickens have been around for just 10,000 years.
Why does the egg come first?
So proto-hen laid an egg, and proto-rooster fertilized it. So in a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you like), two birds that weren’t really chickens created a chicken egg, and hence, we have an answer: The egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken.
Can every egg become a chicken?
MYTH: A fertilized egg has a baby chick in it. FACT: Freshly laid eggs can never contain a chick. Only fertilized eggs that have been incubated under proper conditions can become an embryo and develop into a chick.
Where did the first chicken come from?
In a “landmark” study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Kunming Institute of Zoology and published in Cell Research, researchers discovered that the world’s first chicken hatched 9,500 years ago in Southeast Asia.
Are chickens female?
Rooster or cock is a term for an adult male bird, and younger male may be called a cockerel. A male that has been castrated is a capon. An adult female bird is called a hen and a sexually immature female is called a pullet….
| Chicken | |
|---|---|
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Galliformes |
| Family: | Phasianidae |
| Genus: | Gallus |
Which is first, the chicken or the egg?
But it doesn’t matter; at some point in evolutionary history when there were no chickens, two birds that were almost-but-not-quite chickens mated and laid an egg that hatched into the first chicken. If you are prepared to call that egg a chicken’s egg, then the egg came first.
Can a chicken grow up to be an egg?
Neil deGrasse Tyson has endorsed this idea of the not-quite-a-chicken bird laying the egg which would grow up to be a chicken, and Bill Nye agreed. A few years ago a group of scientists did write about how a particular protein required for chicken egg shell formation was only found in chicken ovaries.
Do you need a chicken to lay an egg?
It’s such a tricky question because you need a chicken to lay an egg, but chickens come from eggs, leaving us with an intractable circle of clucky, feathery life that apparently has no clear starting point. Thankfully, there’s no need to keep brooding over this forever.
Which is the oldest bird, egg or chicken?
Archaeopteryx fossils, which are the oldest generally accepted as birds, are around 150 million years old, which means that birds in general came after eggs in general. That answer is also true— the egg comes first —when you narrow it down to chickens and the specific eggs from which they emerge.