• Question: Which do you think came first: the chicken or the egg? :))

    Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 21 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      More philosophical questions!
      This is a question that has been asked and not answered for thousands of years so feel under-qualified to answer it, but I’ll have a go:

      Through evolution, the offspring of two animals have slight differences from both parents. An egg contains the embryo of the newly formed animal. Evolution is a very gradual process, taking many thousands of years for species to evolve, but at some point in it’s history, the genetic line of the chicken looked less like another bird, and more like a chicken. This new species would have had to start with an egg, so I would say that the egg is the answer.
      However you could argue that the chicken is contained within the egg anyway so maybe they both came at the same time.

      There are some theories that birds actually evolved from dinosaurs, so maybe the question should be, which came first, the dinosaur or the egg.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      daviesI3 – What a question!

      I wish I had the answer to this, but I don’t and I’m not even going to try.
      If you ever find out, can you let me know? 🙂

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Ahhh!!!!! GREAT question!!! The dinosaur or the egg, good answer Martin!

      I’d say the chicken. 🙂

      At some point, mutations in the living bird and evolutionary processes made a bird lay an egg that was a little different from the rest. In time, this comes to make the chicken, or other special types of birds!

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