• Question: if the egg came before the chicken what came first the dinosaur or the egg?

    Asked by killadwarf to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by killamigit.
    • Photo: Alex Munro

      Alex Munro answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      If you believe that the egg came before the chicken (which is possibly implied in the way you asked the question), then it would be logical to believe that the egg came before the dinosaur…

      Would you agree?

    • Photo: Amy Reeve

      Amy Reeve answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      The egg came before the dinosaur. If life evolved from the sea, and from sea creatures, which also mostly lay eggs, Then the egg definitely came first 🙂

    • Photo: Andy MacLeod

      Andy MacLeod answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      This was slightly trickier than I first thought. I was just going to write what Alex said. Or possibly just “What Alex said!”, but she beat me to it, so I gave it a little more thought.

      “Chicken” refers to a species of bird. “Dinosaur” refers to a more diverse group of creatures. It’s actually a recognised taxon (that’s just a name for a level of biological classification), which I didn’t know. I thought it was just a made up category. It’s apparently a sub-order, so between Order and Family in the taxonomic hierarchy.

      The taxomic description of dinosaurs would appear to be “Triceratops, Neornithes, their most recent common ancestor, and all descendants”. Neornithes are modern birds. I guess that means dinosaurs aren’t extinct after all. So I guess the question now becomes “did ALL dinosaurs lay eggs?”. Given that dinosaurs are either reptiles or birds, then I’d say “probably”.

      So I’m going to revert to my chicken answer: the egg from which the first dinosaur hatched came before the first dinosaur.
      🙂

    • Photo: Georgia Campbell

      Georgia Campbell answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      No matter what animal that hatched from a egg we’re talking about, the egg always has to come first!

      The way that evolution works, a reptile that was like a dinosaur laid an egg, and the baby inside this egg had a random mutation that made it a little bit different from its parents – the first dinosaur! – so the first dinosaur has to hatch from the egg.

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