Last week, it was claimed that one of the oldest conundrums know to man had been laid to rest, when scientists at the universities of Sheffield and Warwick announced they'd found evidence that the chicken really did come before the egg. A study into how chicken eggs are formed discovered that a protein found in the chickens ovaries, ovocledidin-17, is vital for shell production. According to the reserchers, this means that the chickens must have come first.
Is there anything more to this than an entertaining news story? Perhaps not becuase, as one of the schientists involved in the study conceded, there were other types of egg-laying species that pre-dated chickens, and these didn't necassarily produce their eggs the same way. Just becuase the hen is needed to produce a chicken egg, this doesn't mean a dinosour egg couldn't once have existed without a tyrannosaurus. Besides, the theory of evolution has long since rendered the chicken-egg dilemma something of a non-mystery anyway: once you allow species adaption to enter the equation, it is fairly straight forward to see how a new egg-laying species might come about.
Read more at The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment