Scientists ask, “Is it the chicken and the egg, or the chicken and the egg?” He may have found an important clue to the answer to the question.
According to a new study by a research team from the University of Geneva, conditions in which eggs could emerge existed before chickens appeared in nature.
According to the news in Euronews, researchers at the University of Geneva were pursuing the question of how the first life forms, which actually consisted of a single cell, evolved and became more complex over time. To discover this, they were studying Chromosphaera perkinsii, a single-celled species discovered in marine sediments around Hawaii in 2017.
‘IT MAY HAVE EXISTED BEFORE THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMAL’
More than a billion years ago, this species formed multicellular structures that bore striking similarities to animal embryos. This made this species a good model for investigating the evolutionary process that led to multicellularity.
Scientists discovered that when Chromosphaera perkinsii reaches its maximum size, it divides without growing any further, forming multicellular colonies with a three-dimensional structure that resembles the early stages of animal embryonic development. According to the researchers, this means that embryonic development may have existed before the evolution of animals.
‘THE EGG EVOLVED BEFORE THE CHICKEN’
Accordingly, the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development already existed before the emergence of animal life. So nature had the genetic tools to “produce eggs” long before it “invented chickens.” So the egg evolved before the chicken.
“A very recently discovered species allows us to go back more than a billion years,” said Marine Olivetta, one of the authors of the study.
The research was published in the respected scientific journal Nature.
