For centuries, the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first has served as both riddle and philosophical provocation. Now, researchers applying the lens of evolutionary biology have offered a resolution — not through cleverness, but through clarity: eggs predate chickens by hundreds of millions of years, and the first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a bird that was not yet quite a chicken. The paradox, it turns out, was never a paradox at all, but a symptom of treating living species as fixed things rather than as populations in perpetual, gradual transformation.