Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

The almighty egg has to be one of the most versatile and fascinating objects ever to have landed on earth. Arriving before the chicken and sometime after the dinosaur it has survived wars, earthquakes and floods of biblical proportions, but how? The answer is simple, the egg is in fact, a master of disguise. It learnt early-on to hide itself inside chickens coming out once a day to have a look around. So there you have it, Omlet has cleared up a question that has been bothering people for centuries, it was obvious really!

How Is an Egg Made?

Chickens are amazing! When your hens are laying well, they will produce a new egg every 25.5 hours. This is a very short time to create something as complex, as perfect and as tasty as an egg. An egg is made from the inside out. The yolk is made first, and then wrapped in a layer of egg white, before being neatly and beautifully packaged up in an egg shell.
The beginning of an egg is the tiny ova which takes a week to grow into a proper egg yolk. If you cut a boiled egg in half and look at the yolk, the dark rings were layers made during the day and the light layers during the hours of darkness. Strange but true!
When the yolk is ready it is released along the oviduct. The first part of the oviduct is where the egg white (albumen) is added. The egg white mainly consists of protein, water and minerals.
Then the egg carries on along the oviduct where it grows two connecting strands at the top and the bottom called chalaza, which anchor the yolk to the shell keeping it in the centre of the egg.
The next stage is for the shell membranes to form around the white. After this the egg continues down into the uterus where the shell is added. The shell is made from calcium carbonate, which is also found in marble and chalk. The shell is a great bit of design, it is on average only 0.3mm thick but it is incredibly strong.

Colour of the Shell

The colour of the shell depends on the breed of chicken and on the individual chicken itself. Some chickens lay dark brown eggs like the Barnevelder and the Araucana lays a blue egg, but the colour of the shell doesn't affect the taste.

Do You Need a Cockerel?

No 😊

Chickens lay quite happily without the amorous intentions of a handsome red wattled male, such as old Perky here.

Should you have a cockerel, you can be sure he will do his best to fertilise the eggs. If a chicken is broody she will then sit on these eggs for 21 days (the incubation period) and with a bit of luck these eggs will hatch and produce more chickens.
The eggs a chicken lays without the help of a cockerel are not fertilised and will therefore never hatch.

The Chicken or the Egg?

The age old riddle of  which came first, the chicken or the egg' is believed to have been cracked by a team of scientists in 2010. The eggsperts believe the answer is the chicken. The researchers found that for an egg to be made it must have developed in the ovaries of a chicken which means there had to be a chicken before an egg. So that's that one solved!
Now here's the technical bit: A specific protein in the ovaries of chickens, called ovocleidin-17, is responsible for converting calcium carbonate into calcite crystals. These calcite crystals make up the shell of the egg and allow the egg to be laid.