A hen in Sri Lanka defied all odds when it hatched an eggless chick, giving a new twist to the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen, the BBC reported.
The chick is fully formed and healthy but the mother has died.
The government veterinary officer in the area asserted that he had never seen anything like it before.
PR Yapa, the chief veterinary officer of Welimada, where it took place, looked into the hen’s carcass.
He found that the fertilised egg had developed within the hen's reproductive system, but stayed inside the hen's body till the time it hatched.
A post-mortem conducted on the hen’s body revealed that it died of internal wounds.