Question: What came first the chicken or the egg?

Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 22 Jun 2010:

Well archosaurs (dinosaurs, reptiles and birds) developed a strategy of laying eggs and the dinosaur members of the archosaur group were doing this before birds branched off from them during the Mesozoic Era. So the ability to lay eggs came before birds- so in that sense I would say THE EGG came first. However, chickens are born from chicken eggs which are specially developed to support and nourish the growing chicken embryo. However, chickens themselves are thought to be descended from the junglefowl- so I guess I would still say that the egg came first from an evolutionary perspective and that the first chicken probably looked more like a junglefowl than the chickens we know and love and eat today (yum!).