Scientists Reveal a Shocking Solution to The Chicken or Egg Paradox

Life on Earth may have developed the ability to form embryos even before it grew the very first animals.

A single-celled organism that lives burrowed in the muck beneath shallow seas bears a startling resemblance to animal embryos as it reproduces, says a team of scientists led by biochemist Marine Olivetta of the University of Geneva. The way it divides itself resembles the process of embryonic cell division.

The organism in question is an Ichthyosporean microbe called Chromosphaera perkinsii, and since it has been around for over a billion years, long before the first animals emerged, its existence suggests that life developed the programming for eggs before the eggs themselves.

“Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species,” explains biochemist Omaya Dudin of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, “this behavior shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth.”

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