It is the age old question that has baffled everybody – what came first the chicken or the egg?
Well scientists believe they have finally cracked the age old mystery and it is the egg.
Researchers from Geneva University believe the mechanisms to create an egg existed way before the existence of the chicken.
They found that Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii.
The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over one billion years, well before the appearance of the first animals 300 million years ago.
A team observed that this species forms multicellular structures that bear striking similarities to animal embryos.
These observations suggest that the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development were already present before the emergence of animal life, or that C. perkinsii evolved independently to develop similar processes.
Nature therefore possesses the genetic tools to ‘create eggs’ over a billion years ago long before it ‘invented chickens’ 300 million years ago.
This news is exciting for scientists like Marine Olivetta, from the Swiss university’s biochemistry department.
She told Nature Journal: ‘It’s fascinating, a species discovered so recently allows us to go back in time a billion years.’
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