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"In this work, which strings together one philosophical table debate after another, many important questions of modern life are anticipated. Is fish healthier than meat? When is the best time of day for sex? Do mushrooms develop from thunder? And that very eternal question that particularly concerns us at Easter: Was the hen first, or the egg from which the sweet yellow chicks hatch?
In fact, the question is more likely formulated as "bird or egg." But the chickens, which had long been kept in the Mediterranean region by that time, also soon appear. The reference to Democritus's atomic theory seems astonishingly current and at the same time typical of ancient reasoning: Since the larger is always based on the smaller, according to one guest, the egg must have come first. Another participant finds the question silly. A third also dislikes such seemingly insignificant puzzles: because once you start with that, you quickly end up with the question of the origin of the world itself. Perhaps not quite that far back, but still to the beginnings of Even today, one can be guided by this question. Even ancient diners listed all sorts of other egg-laying animals in their arguments, from frogs, crocodiles, and snakes to insects and fish. And the comparison between the egg that encases the chick and the human womb, which is particularly insightful for us, was also mentioned back then.
The first "real egg" in Earth's history was laid 300 million years ago. Not by a chicken; because chickens didn't exist at that time. The ancient giant continent of Pangaea flourished in the center of the globe. Despite the rather cool climate, warm swamp forests thrived, which later transformed into our present-day coal seams. In one such seam in Canada, fossilized bones were found in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution. They belonged to a type of prehistoric lizard—the first so-called amniote and thus the first "true" land vertebrate ever.
The first Vertebrates had already emerged in the form of fish 200 million years earlier from the great evolution of life we call the Cambrian Explosion. When these fish crawled onto land, they had a problem. Fish eggs, which we like to eat as sturgeon caviar, are only suitable for reproduction in water. The spawn of amphibians such as frogs and salamanders also dries out on land. The first amphibian-like land vertebrates thus took the enormously important step to shore. But they didn't get very far.
The first to do so was the small "lizard" of the coal forests, which is considered not only the first official amniote, but also the first reptile. Its eggs didn't yet resemble our beautiful, solid Easter eggs, which retain their shape even when blown out. They were probably more leathery and soft, like real lizards and snakes today. Nevertheless, they protected the insides from dryness much better than slimy fish or frog eggs.
And behind the shell, the embryo thrived in a water-filled chamber with a membrane that created a pond on land: the amnion.
This amniotic membrane and the protective shell are traditionally considered a prerequisite for the spread of early reptiles on land. Some researchers today believe that live birth may also have played a role. But the fact that the egg system works is evident not only in pangolins such as spiny lizards or tortoises, which thrived even in the desert. Dinosaurs, the largest land reptiles of all time, which dominated the Earth's fauna for a very long time, also laid eggs. So do their modern descendants: birds.
This, too, is part of the equation when tracing the question of "chicken or egg." It could be not only "lizard or egg," but also "dino or egg"—and has continued to do so to this day. Among many other things, the first "terrestrial lizards" emerged from the lizard-like first amniotes around 230 million years ago, from which the famous long-necked giants and bipedal predatory dinosaurs later evolved. As we now know, the dinosaurs resembled the latter, however, often resemble feathered ratites and lead directly to our modern-day poultry. So every cute Easter chick is essentially a little T-Rex, and every Easter egg is actually a dinosaur egg.
Even the old myth of the egg-hiding Easter bunny takes on new relevance in retrospect. Even before the "forest lizard" documented in the fossil record, the reptilian ancestors of mammals branched off from an unknown primordial amniote. Thus, even the primordial mammals living in the shadow of the dinosaurs continued to lay eggs for a long time, just as the platypuses and echidnas, which are mammals, still do today. At that time, however, a longer gestation period in the protective belly may have proven beneficial in the harsh dinosaur world. And after the impact of the meteorite that wiped out the large land dinosaurs 66 million years ago, live birth and milk-feeding may have even provided the decisive advantage.
Amniotes and original egg-layers are we humans, who are mammals, but we still are today. In our case, the amnion simply encloses the amniotic sac, and the protective "eggshell" is formed by the mother's belly. If we trace the question of chicken or egg even more consistently back to its origins, we even end up in a time before the Cambrian explosion. Back then, 600 million years ago, microscopic eggs may have already developed into coral-like creatures with three spiral-shaped outgrowths. They may have resembled a tiny Easter bush.
Markus Bennemann is a publicist and recently published the book "The Beginning of All Deliciousness" (Goldmann).” [1]
1. Every cute Easter chick is a little T-Rex: One of our big questions used to be: What came first? The egg or the lizard? [1]
1. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 19 Apr 2025: 11. Von Markus Bennemann
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