• Question: what came first the chicken or the egg?

    Asked by to Roy, Rowena, Nicola, Kieren, Kate on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Kate Nicholson

      Kate Nicholson answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Definitely the egg – chickens aren’t the only animal to lay them and if you believe in evolution or not, dinosaurs were laying eggs long before there were chickens.
      Did you know that there’s a huge amount of research funding given this year trying to work out just when we started keeping chickens? All over the world there are many cultures that have domesticated chickens, but there is very little clue as to just when this happened?

    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Agreed – eggs. Even assuming we are talking only about chicken eggs, the chicken egg still came before the chicken. At some stage egg-laying reptiles like dinosaurs evolved into chickens. Can you imagine something between a dinosaur and a chicken? Well, somewhere during that change we stop calling them reptiles and start calling them chickens. The first chicken would still have come from an egg laid by an almost-chicken dinosaur.

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