Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Scientists claim to answer age-old question

Life will find a lay.

Just weeks after archaeologists potentially “discovered who invented the wheel,” scientists in Switzerland might’ve finally cracked which came first: the chicken or the egg?

The hard-boiled detectives came to their conclusion based on a single-celled organism that long predated our fine-feathered friend, per the study published in the journal Nature, leading them to declare the egg as the official predecessor.

“Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth,” said biochemist and study lead author Omaya Dudin of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. maxximmm – stock.adobe.com

“It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years,” according to study author Marine Olivetta, a biochemist at the University of Geneva, Science Alert reported.

That was long before complex animals came onto the evolutionary scene around 550 million years ago.

Dubbed Chromosphaera perkinsii, the fossilized critter was discovered in Hawaii in 2017.

However, researchers found recently that the organism, which burrowed in mud beneath shallow seas, formed multicellular structures that were similar to animal embryos.

Images of the multicellular development of the ichthyosporean Chromosphaera perkinsii. O. Dudin/ UNIGE

This suggested that the genetic blueprint for eggs existed before the eggs themselves.

“Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth,” said biochemist and study lead author Omaya Dudin of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

On a larger scale, this primordial egg drop soup may have shed light on the origins of life itself.

While the evolution of single-celled organisms to multicellular beings was predicted to have occurred much earlier than the emergence of complex animals, the mechanism behind this transition was still very poorly understood — until now.

In the case of C perkinsii, the cells divided after they stopped growing, creating the aforementioned egg-like embryo.

These colonies then lived on for a third of their parent organism’s lifecycle — which scientists deemed “surprising.”

Scientists hope to conduct further studies to determine whether the function behind multicellular development could have evolved separately in C perkinsii.

Coincidentally, this isn’t the first time scientists claimed to have solved the chicken-and-egg conundrum.

In 2018, Australian physicists used quantum physics to show that the chicken and the egg can both come first — on account of quantum mechanics.