alt Hacker NewsThere were eggs long before there were anything like a bird or a chicken.
But if you're on the strict interpretation, the change was so gradual over so many generations it's hard if not impossible to detect. Even when it speciates (becomes unable to produce viable offspring after mating) is hard to tell. There was like likely a long stretch of many generations where sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
TL:DR; How long is a piece of string?
edit: Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios? Jupiter and thunderstorms produce them, but we had no way of knowing so to us they did not exist.
> Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios?
I'm not sure that is analogous. The chicken/egg question is about at what point we started identifying an egg as being a chicken egg as opposed to being an egg from another animal. In other words, did the first chicken egg come from a chicken (meaning the chicken came first), or from a proto-chicken (meaning the egg came first)?
A closer variation might be: Which came first, the radio broadcast or the radio broadcaster? Before the radio broadcast and radio broadcaster there was radio and people using radio, but they did not reach a wide public audience. At some point the early small-scale experimental radio use turned into broad utilization, but when and which was earlier on the timeline?