What came first - the egg or the gecko inside?

Australian scientists are trying to crack the mystery of how a tiny lizard found its way inside a chicken’s egg.

The bizarre discovery was made by a doctor in Darwin as he made dinner earlier this week.

Peter Beaumont broke open an egg and was shocked to find a dead gecko inside. “I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy. I looked at the shell and saw a tiny gecko,” he said.

The lizard could not have entered the egg after it was cracked open because it was embedded between the interior of the shell and the egg’s membrane, he said.

Dr Beaumont believes the lizard climbed into the chicken’s bottom, perhaps to feed on an embryo, before dying and becoming cocooned in the developing egg.

“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world. It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed.

“If you open up a dead chook, you sometimes see the partly-formed eggs. The gecko could have been looking for a feed and got trapped.”

Dr Beaumont, 60, the president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory, said his unusual find could be a world first.

He has handed the remains of the egg to health authorities who will try to work out exactly how the gecko got inside the egg.




The Australian Egg Corporation said it had never heard of such a case before.

“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed,” said the corporation’s research and development manager, David Witcombe.

“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”

It is a question that has vexed philosophers since the Greeks. But it seems we may now have the answer to the beguilingly simple question: "Which came first?" It's the egg.

This reassuring conclusion was the work of an expert panel including a philosopher, geneticist and chicken farmer.

"Whether chicken eggs preceded chickens hinges on the nature of chicken eggs," said panel member and philosopher of science David Papineau at King's College London.

"I would argue it's a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg. By this reasoning, the first chicken did indeed come from a chicken egg, even though that egg didn't come from chickens."

The oldest recorded reference to the childish conundrum goes back to a collection of essays and discussions by the Greek historian Mestrius Plutarchus, born in 46AD. In a section entitled Whether the Hen or the Egg Came First he suggested that the question was already well established: "The problem about the egg and the hen, which of them came first, was dragged into our talk, a difficult problem which gives investigators much trouble."

Plutarchus also hinted at the puzzle's greater significance: "Sulla my comrade said that with a small problem, as with a tool, we were rocking loose a great and heavy one, that of the creation of the world."

Whether the panel solved that debate is not clear, but they were unanimous on the correct chicken/egg pecking order. John Brookfield, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Nottingham said the solution involves piecing together the speciation event in which chickens first evolved.

He imagines two non-chicken parents getting together and giving rise to the first individual of a new species because of a genetic mutation. "The first chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic change, perhaps a very subtle one, but one which caused this bird to be the first ever to fulfil our criteria for truly being a chicken," said Prof Brookfield.

"Thus the living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken that it would develop into, and thus would itself be a member of the species of chicken," he added.

Dark Rider wrote:

Australian scientists are trying to crack the mystery of how a tiny lizard found its way inside a chicken’s egg.

The bizarre discovery was made by a doctor in Darwin as he made dinner earlier this week.

Peter Beaumont broke open an egg and was shocked to find a dead gecko inside. “I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy. I looked at the shell and saw a tiny gecko,” he said.

The lizard could not have entered the egg after it was cracked open because it was embedded between the interior of the shell and the egg’s membrane, he said.

Dr Beaumont believes the lizard climbed into the chicken’s bottom, perhaps to feed on an embryo, before dying and becoming cocooned in the developing egg.

“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world. It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed.

“If you open up a dead chook, you sometimes see the partly-formed eggs. The gecko could have been looking for a feed and got trapped.”

Dr Beaumont, 60, the president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory, said his unusual find could be a world first.

He has handed the remains of the egg to health authorities who will try to work out exactly how the gecko got inside the egg.




The Australian Egg Corporation said it had never heard of such a case before.

“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed,” said the corporation’s research and development manager, David Witcombe.

“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”

Dark Rider wrote:

Australian scientists are trying to crack the mystery of how a tiny lizard found its way inside a chicken’s egg.

The bizarre discovery was made by a doctor in Darwin as he made dinner earlier this week.

Peter Beaumont broke open an egg and was shocked to find a dead gecko inside. “I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy. I looked at the shell and saw a tiny gecko,” he said.

The lizard could not have entered the egg after it was cracked open because it was embedded between the interior of the shell and the egg’s membrane, he said.

Dr Beaumont believes the lizard climbed into the chicken’s bottom, perhaps to feed on an embryo, before dying and becoming cocooned in the developing egg.

“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world. It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed.

“If you open up a dead chook, you sometimes see the partly-formed eggs. The gecko could have been looking for a feed and got trapped.”

Dr Beaumont, 60, the president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory, said his unusual find could be a world first.

He has handed the remains of the egg to health authorities who will try to work out exactly how the gecko got inside the egg.




The Australian Egg Corporation said it had never heard of such a case before.

“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed,” said the corporation’s research and development manager, David Witcombe.

“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”