Single-celled organism may hold the answer to the classic chicken-egg riddle
Without the chicken, there is no egg; without the egg, there is no chicken – but which came first? This dilemma has puzzled many great minds over the years. It seems that scientists from the University of Geneva have stumbled upon an intriguing clue.
Chromosphaera perkinsii is a species of single-celled organism discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth date back to over a billion years ago, long before the appearance of the first animals. A team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Omaya Dudina observed that this species forms multicellular structures that show a striking similarity to animal embryos.
It's fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years – stated Marine Olivietta, a lab technician and research participant.
John Burns, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory, noted that some of the genes that these microbes use to drive their development and the overall patterns they follow are similar to those we observe in animals. This process of embryonic development proceeds through precise stages that are amazingly similar across animal species and may date back to a period long before their appearance.
Researchers caution, however, that the transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms is still poorly understood.
This doesn’t end the egg debate
Although the new clue is promising, participants in the debate emphasise that "egg" is not the same as "egg." The first hard-shelled eggs were laid only about 200 million years ago.
The ancestor of our chicken comes from the jungles of Southeast Asia. One day, such a primitive hen laid a primitive hen's egg. Instead, a regular chicken hatched, and it was only then that the first chicken egg, as we know it, appeared — points out "Bild".
