While watching a rerun of Jurassic Park I noticed the scientists in the movie were hatching baby dinosaurs they re-engineered with DNA that came from a mosquito. I also noticed these baby dinosaurs were hatching from an egg. So immediately my mind went to the old argument which came first the chicken or the egg or maybe in this case the dinosaur or the egg?
So, I began wondering if a chicken that was genetically engineered would hatch from an egg. It was something I’d never pondered on before. I know about calves and cows, mares and colts, goats and kids, but I don’t much about chickens. So I began to look up stuff on the internet. I wanted to know just how would you grow the first of a species. We use recipient cows, mares and momma goats, but what if there isn’t any of those species. How would you “hatch” the first baby?
It turns out they already use unfertilized eggs and insert embryos in them to grow one type of bird or another. I even read that some big time entertainment companies have spent millions trying to grow a real life dinosaur. The thought process is they can charge admission to gawk at a real life dinosaur, just like in the Jurassic Park movie. What I read is that they’ve not been able to keep them alive, it takes several months of incubating the eggs for them to hatch. There was some speculation the length of incubation combined with relatively small weather changes could have caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.
So after all of my research on which came first, the chicken or the egg, I still don’t have a good answer. Today, scientists use recipient eggs. How did the first chicken come to be? Or maybe I should ask how did the first egg come to be?
I told my wife I was writing about the old argument of which came first the chicken or the egg, she rolled her eyes and said only you would wonder about that. Well, I’m a farmer and I like messing with animals. Since I’ve done all of this reading about incubating eggs I’ve decided I want an incubator. I might grow me some Rhode Island Red chickens, I just think they are pretty and they eat bugs. I guess it doesn’t take much to keep me entertained.
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.