Many people have been confused by the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Considering how it keeps going around and around, it may not be worth looking into. But it is also something that could be important to people who study evolution.
Still, science has something to say about this puzzling situation.
1. Chicken or Egg Puzzle
Several biologists, according to Live Science, say that eggs were around before chickens. Basically, eggs are just the sex cells of females. Amniotic eggs, which are hard eggs that can be laid on the ground from the outside, changed a lot about how vertebrates lived.
Koen Stein, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, says that eggs are a key part of how vertebrates have changed over time. This is because eggs make it possible for amniotes to move farther away from water.
Live Science says that before these hard eggs came along, vertebrates needed water to be able to have babies. This is still a problem for some amphibians, because their eggs need to stay moist to live.
A study that was published in the journal Current Biology says that fossil records did not show true birds before. They didn’t appear until the middle to late Jurassic period, about 150 to 165 million years ago.
But the Biodiversity Center at the University of Texas says that the first eggs with shells may have come about a long time before that. This shows that the egg really did come before the chicken.
