Australia Doctor Finds Dead Gecko in Chicken Egg
Saturday , May 17, 2008
A doctor in Australia this week was shocked to find a gecko inside an egg he had just cracked open as he was cooking his dinner, the Telegraph reported.
Peter Beaumont broke open the egg and found a tiny dead gecko. "I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy. I looked at the shell and saw a tiny gecko," he said in the story.
The lizard was embedded between the interior of the shell and the egg’s membrane, said Beaumont, who believes it climbed into the chicken, possibly to eat an embryo, and got trapped and died in the area where the eggs form inside the chicken.
Beaumont, 60, who is president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory, believes his discovery could be the first such instance in the world.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,356484,00.html=============
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“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world. It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed.
“If you open up a dead chook, you sometimes see the partly-formed eggs. The gecko could have been looking for a feed and got trapped.”
Dr Beaumont, 60, the president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory, said his unusual find could be a world first.
He has handed the remains of the egg to health authorities who will try to work out exactly how the gecko got inside the egg.
The Australian Egg Corporation said it had never heard of such a case before.
“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed,” said the corporation’s research and development manager, David Witcombe.
“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1966106/What-came-first---the-egg-or-the-gecko-inside.html
