It’s the ancient enigma that has baffled scientists for hundreds of years.
But experts may have finally solved the riddle of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Scientists at the University of Geneva say the building blocks of female reproductive cells (eggs) appeared long before chickens evolved.
They analyzed a single-celled species called Chromosphaera perkinskii that was discovered in 2017 in Hawaiian marine sediments.
The first signs of its presence on Earth date back more than a billion years, long before the appearance of the first animals.
The researchers observed that this species forms multicellular structures that bear striking similarities to animal embryos.
This discovery suggests that the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development (the process by which a fertilized egg becomes an embryo) were already present before the emergence of animal life, they said.
Therefore, nature would have possessed the genetic tools to “create eggs” long before “inventing chickens,” they explained.
It’s the ancient enigma that has baffled scientists for hundreds of years. But experts may have finally solved the riddle of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
The scientists analyzed a single-celled species called Chromosphaera perkinskii that was discovered in 2017 in Hawaiian marine sediments.
Author Omaya Dudin said: “Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behavior shows that multicellular differentiation and coordination processes are already present in the species, long before the first animals appeared on Earth.”
Previous research suggests that even hard-shelled eggs, like those of chickens, probably did not emerge until 300 million years ago.
Marine Olivetta, first author of the study, said: “It’s fascinating, a very recently discovered species allows us to go back in time more than a billion years.”
An independent study published earlier this year suggests that the ability to lay eggs regularly, compared to other birds, is what made chickens so attractive to humans thousands of years ago, leading to their domestication already. become the chicken we know today.
