Which came first: the egg or the chicken? Scientists have come up with an answer

The question about the chicken and the egg is so complex and ancient that it is already perceived more as a philosophical discussion. Most biologists unequivocally argue that the egg appeared first. At the most basic level, they're just female germ cells, notes Cohen Stein, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

But it was the hard, outer eggs that could be laid on land (also known as amniotic eggs) that changed the lives of vertebrates, writes Live science.

Until now, this question has been difficult to answer, as true birds did not appear in the fossil record until almost the end of the Jurassic, about 165 to 150 million years ago. Now it is known that the first hard-shelled eggs appeared long before that - about 325 million years ago. This means that the egg appeared long before the chicken, Stein concluded.

If we talk specifically about domesticated chicken, then the question becomes a little more complicated. They are thought to have descended from a subspecies of the red forest bird about 50 million years ago.

In this paradigm, the opposite is true: the extreme ancestor of the modern chicken laid an egg with an embryo that had many genetic differences. From it, in some period of domestication, the first chicken appeared. He soon laid the same egg that we are used to seeing in supermarkets.