In a new study, the scientists claimed to have found the answer to one of the most baffling questions in the history of humankind — ‘What came first: Chicken or the egg?’. The question has to date left everyone, from scholars to schoolchildren, stumped. However, scientists now claim to have discovered the answer.

As per the researchers from the University of Bristol, the early ancestors of reptiles and modern birds are likely to have given birth to live young and may have not laid eggs, according to The Times. The Journal Nature Ecology and Evolution published the study which detailed the discovery.

Scientists, along with researchers from Nanjing University, have challenged the belief which existed so far that hard-shelled eggs were the reason for the success of amniotes, which are animals whose foetuses are developed inside an amnion (membrane or sack) inside the egg.

Down beneath the tourist lodges and shops selling keychains and incense, past windswept arroyos and brown valleys speckled with agave, juniper and sagebrush, the rocks of the Grand Canyon seem untethered from time. The oldest ones date back 1.8 billion years, not just eons before humans laid eyes on them, but eons before evolution endowed any organism on this planet with eyes.

Spend long enough in the canyon, and you might start feeling a little unmoored from time yourself. The immense walls form a kind of cocoon, sealing you off from the modern world, with its cell signal and light pollution and disappointments. They draw your eyes relentlessly upward, as in a cathedral.

You might think you are seeing all the way to the top. But up and above are more walls, and above them even more, out of sight except for the occasional glimpse. For the canyon is not just deep. It is broad, too — 18 miles, rim to rim, at its widest. This is no mere cathedral of stone. It is a kingdom: sprawling, self-contained, an alternate reality existing magnificently outside of our own.