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Asked by 10yling to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 10 Mar 2013.
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Hayley Evers-King answered on 10 Mar 2013:
Based on evolution, I’d suggest the egg. Dinosaurs existed before chickens and we know they laid eggs, so if you mean any egg, then eggs definitely came first. If you mean specifically a chicken egg, then most of the information that I’ve seen suggests birds evolved from dinosaurs – so eventually after many, many generations an egg would have been laid that hatched as something very similar to our modern chickens. This bird probably didn’t look a lot like our modern chickens however, as these have been selectively bred by us for eating/laying eggs. It’s thought that the wild ancestor of the modern chicken is the Indian Jungle Fowl.
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Edward Bovill answered on 12 Mar 2013:
It entirely depends on what you mean by ‘egg’.
Many animals laid eggs before the chicken evolved, including fish, dinosaurs and other birds. So from that point of view eggs definitely came first. However, if you mean ‘chicken egg’ specifically then it depends on how you define a ‘chicken egg’.
At some point the first bird that we now would define as a chicken will have evolved. It will have hatched from an egg, but that egg was laid by a bird that was not quite a chicken.
This newly evolved chicken hatched from an egg, but would you call it a ‘chicken egg’? I, personally, would call the first egg laid by this new chicken the first ‘chicken’s egg’. In that case, the chicken came first.
If you think that the fact the chicken hatched from an egg makes that egg a ‘chicken egg’ as it produced a chicken, then the egg came first.
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