What came before: an egg or a chicken?

A chicken or an egg? This logical riddle worried the minds of venerable philosopher scholars throughout human existence. On the one hand, an egg is needed for the appearance of a chicken, and on the other hand, an egg is simply not able to appear without a chicken. So what do modern scientists say about this? Let’s understand this issue once and for all and tell our friends about it!

The paradoxes of eggs and chicken were tried to be solved by the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plutarch

What is an egg?

The egg is fertilizedan egg, from which either a new chicken or even a crocodile can hatch, if there is any confusion as in Mikhail Bulgakov’s story “Fatal Eggs”. Protein and egg shells are a special protective and nourishing membrane that protects the future chick (or crocodile, for that matter) from bacteria, dangerous viruses or simply drying out. The egg itself is located in the center - in the yolk.

The chicken yolk contains all the genetic information about the future chicken

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What happened before: chicken or egg?

Once upon a time on planet Earth lived onlythe simplest unicellular organisms. We know almost nothing about where they could live, from what natural environment they came from and in general how they looked. Despite this sad fact, scientists are sure that some genes of these creatures were very similar to the genes of modern organisms. In other words, unicellular organisms - our ancestors common with chicken - were carriers of peculiar eggs. And although such “eggs” are not quite similar to chicken or crocodiles, they performed their function with a bang. In other words, the very first eggs could exist a billion years before the appearance of hens.

This is what chicken evolution might look like.

Well, what happened then - and so everyone knows. The cells of organisms continued to improve, turning their carriers into more and more new creatures. The simplest ones turned into fish, which gradually grew their paws and turned into amphibians. Amphibians evolved into reptiles who learned to lay eggs on land. After millions of years of such evolution, dinosaurs appeared on the young planet, which after a while “grew” feathers and turned into birds. Although not all. Some of them still died out.

In other words, the world's first egg is over a billion years old, while the first chicken appeared on Earth only about 90 million years ago.

Well, it seems that the world has become one unsolvable riddle less.

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