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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bEyebV:
I love that image too so I’m going to say yes. Anyone who wants to believe this, and who doesn’t want to think too hard about how chickens live and die and are sort of gross animals (the way most animals are, especially humans, if you look too close), just stop there and go on with your life believing that, because it’s an adorable idea.
~~M E G A C H I C K E N ~~
It’s not true, though, probably. I actually have more experience with eggs hatching than my chicken-farmer sister; she buys her chickens as day-old hatchlings, as is the commercial standard, but when we were kids, and she was too little to remember, we had pet chickens and we let them brood their own eggs, and I learned a whole lot about life and death and such. She doesn’t really remember much; mostly what stuck in her mind was when weasels got in and murdered every single one of them and left their corpses lying. They were pets and they all had names, and the weasels killed them for sport. Left a big impression on us kids. (Mustelidae are bloodthirsty little jerks, mostly.)
What would probably really happen is that neither embryo would develop fully, and you’d have a dud egg. But what more intriguingly might happen, and would do so invisibly, is that you’d wind up with one hatchling that had absorbed the other embryo. We in the evisceration room see all kinds of weird things on the insides of chickens. Sometimes we see weird fat deposits and tumors and things. Last time, two weeks ago, we found one that had a really weird gross sort of calcified, vaguely crunchy mass in the middle of its body, and we looked at it and theorized that it might be just that, an absorbed twin. It was deeply gross and sort of pasta-like and we all gathered around like kids and went ewwww about it. But it wasn’t in any of the organs, it was free-floating like the body had encased it.
So that was our theory. Gross, but kind of cool, the way nature is, you know?
An egg, we think, surely could not hatch twins. If two embryos combined into one animal, that’s something called a chimera, which is relatively common among mammals (including humans, and there is a Wikipedia spiral I can totally recommend; it’s really not gross at all).
And, while chimeras are totally cool, they’re generally not any larger than a regular organism.
(the Guardian says chimeras can occur in birds, so. There’s another answer; it must have come from a double-yolk egg.)
I love that image too so I’m going to say yes. Anyone who wants to believe this, and who doesn’t want to think too hard about how chickens live and die and are sort of gross animals (the way most animals are, especially humans, if you look too close), just stop there and go on with your life believing that, because it’s an adorable idea.
~~M E G A C H I C K E N ~~
It’s not true, though, probably. I actually have more experience with eggs hatching than my chicken-farmer sister; she buys her chickens as day-old hatchlings, as is the commercial standard, but when we were kids, and she was too little to remember, we had pet chickens and we let them brood their own eggs, and I learned a whole lot about life and death and such. She doesn’t really remember much; mostly what stuck in her mind was when weasels got in and murdered every single one of them and left their corpses lying. They were pets and they all had names, and the weasels killed them for sport. Left a big impression on us kids. (Mustelidae are bloodthirsty little jerks, mostly.)
What would probably really happen is that neither embryo would develop fully, and you’d have a dud egg. But what more intriguingly might happen, and would do so invisibly, is that you’d wind up with one hatchling that had absorbed the other embryo. We in the evisceration room see all kinds of weird things on the insides of chickens. Sometimes we see weird fat deposits and tumors and things. Last time, two weeks ago, we found one that had a really weird gross sort of calcified, vaguely crunchy mass in the middle of its body, and we looked at it and theorized that it might be just that, an absorbed twin. It was deeply gross and sort of pasta-like and we all gathered around like kids and went ewwww about it. But it wasn’t in any of the organs, it was free-floating like the body had encased it.
So that was our theory. Gross, but kind of cool, the way nature is, you know?
An egg, we think, surely could not hatch twins. If two embryos combined into one animal, that’s something called a chimera, which is relatively common among mammals (including humans, and there is a Wikipedia spiral I can totally recommend; it’s really not gross at all).
And, while chimeras are totally cool, they’re generally not any larger than a regular organism.
(the Guardian says chimeras can occur in birds, so. There’s another answer; it must have come from a double-yolk egg.)
