A riddle that appeared to have no answer may have finally been solved with scientists now saying that the egg came before the chicken.
The breakthrough that appears to have brought the debate to an end has come from a fossilised prehistoric organism which was discovered in 2017.
Chromosphaera perkinskii, a single-celled organism found in Hawaiian sediments, went on to have cell division into what appears strikingly similar to an animal egg.
And these species have been dated back to over a billion years ago which is a long time before the first animals emerged. The research has been carried out by scientists from the University of Geneva and have been published in the Nature journal.
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And so they believe that genetic programmes leading to embryos developing from a fertilised egg took place before animal life and so in terms of the riddle it was they that then led to the “chicken”.
Author Omaya Dudin said: “Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behaviour shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth.”
It is known that single-cell life such as bacteria existed before animals which developed from an egg cell and the embryo development is very similar in differing animal species. And it had been thought that this process would likely to have dated back to a period before the emergence of animals.
Previous research has also suggested that hard-shelled eggs, like those of chickens, did not likely emerge until 300 million years ago and now it appears as though the first eggs were made more than a billion years ago. The new study has shed light on how multicellular life forms began with chromosphaera perkinskii which reached a maximum size and then formed multicellular colonies resembling animal embryos.
Marine Olivetta, another author of the study in Nature, said: “It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years.” Researchers found that the way the multicellular colonies divided in a three-dimensional structure was “strikingly reminiscent” of the early stages in animal embryonic development.
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