A couple were shell-shocked after discovering a massive egg – with another egg inside.
The egg is more than twice the size of an ordinary one with another complete egg grown inside.
Matt and Louise Macdonald were checking their nesting boxes on their Wiltshire farm when they made the cracking discovery.
Weighing 152g, the monstrous egg from New Macdonalds Farm was sitting in a nesting box in a flock across the road from the couple’s farmhouse in Box, Somerset.
Matt, 45, carried his precious shell along to his local pub in Wraxhall, where head chef Rob Allcock took a video as Matt cracked the egg against the side of a bowl.
There were whoops of “egg in an egg” as a yolk plopped out followed by a normal-sized egg which clunked into the bowl.
Matt went on to crack the second egg into the bowl for Rob to add to a batter mix.
Wife Louise, a 36-year-old mum-of-three, said: “I was so shocked. It was the biggest egg I’d ever seen! It was just humungous.
“I felt sorry for the poor chicken that laid it.
“After realising how heavy the egg was we made bets at the local pub as to whether it was a double-yolker, a triple-yolker or even an egg in an egg.
“We were really hoping for an egg in an egg because it was quite heavy – but they’re really rare.”
“The chances of a triple yolker are 1 in 25 million and an egg in an egg is even rarer.”
“We were really chuffed. I’m sorry to say we didn’t keep the shells.”
“Sometimes, when they’re youngsters, they fault on eggs, so we think it was on of our 100 black copper Marans.
“We collect around 75 eggs per day from that batch and there’s 250 hens in that flock in total.”
The farming family started up their business in 2010 and now have 470 laying hens and three flocks.
They have many free-range, rare-breed chickens producing eggs in all sorts of colours, including blue, white, chocolate and pink.
This cracking find comes just one day after a three-year-old black maran hen from Peterborough produced what’s believed to be the UK’s largest egg at 200g.
The British Natural History Museum said it does not hold statistics on egg size or egg-in-an-egg frequency, but one of its experts confirmed it is “relatively rare” to find a whole egg inside another egg.
Douglas Russell, curator of the Natural History Museum’s egg collection, said in an article for New Scientist: “Several theories have been proposed for the origin of double eggs.
“A series of abnormal contractions could force a complete or semi-complete egg back up the oviduct, and should this egg meet another developing egg travelling normally down the oviduct, the latter can engulf the former; more simply another layer of albumen and shell can form around the original egg.”
