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  • A visitor interacts with the Live Chicken Embryo exhibit.
  • Live Chicken Embryo exhibit showing the stages of growth.
  • Watch a live chick as it develops from a soup of cells into an embryo with a beating heart.

  • A visitor interacts with the Live Chicken Embryo exhibit.
  • Live Chicken Embryo exhibit showing the stages of growth.
  • Chick Embryo Development

Live Chicken Embryos

Take a look at living chicken embryos in various stages of development.

It takes just 21 days for an egg to go from just laid to newly hatched chick, and a lot goes on in just the first week. Look closely and you’ll find blood vessels, a backbone, wing buds, eyes, a brain, and—throbbing prominently by day 5 or so—a beating heart.


Where:   Gallery 4: Living Systems
Exhibit Developers:   Charles Carlson and Denise King, 1980

What’s going on?

The life of a chicken embryo begins inside the hen, before the egg is laid. A rooster deposits sperm into the hen’s reproductive tract. A sperm unites with a yolk cell, forming an embryo. The hard shell then grows around the yolk before it is laid.

After an egg is laid, an incubated egg develops quickly. What starts as a white spot on day one develops visible blood vessels on day two. Four or five days after being laid, the embryo has a visible backbone and a beating heart. After six or seven days, the wing buds, eyes, and brain are visible.

Chicken embryo, day 1
 
Day 1
(after hen lays egg and starts incubating it)
Look for the white embryo in the center of the nutrient-rich yolk. All the embryos here look similar to developing human embryos.
(click diagram to enlarge)
 
Chicken embryo, day 2
 
Day 2
Look for developing blood vessels that will connect the embryo to the yolk, its source of food. This embryo has about four times as many cells as on day 1.
(click diagram to enlarge)
 
Chicken embryo, days 3 to 4
 
Days 3 to 4
Look for a backbone, blood vessels, and a beating heart. This embryo has four to fifteen times as many cells as a day 2 embryo.
(click diagram to enlarge)
 
Chicken embryo, days 5 to 7
 
Days 5 to 7
Look for the tiny wing buds, eyes, and brain. At this stage it still looks a lot like a human embryo. By day 21, the chick would be ready to hatch.
(click diagram to enlarge)
 
 

External resources

Zoomable High-Resolution Image of a Chicken Embryo. © GigaMicro.

 
Phenomena: Embryonic Development, Reproduction
Keywords: embryology
Aliases: Chick Embryos, Chicken Eggs, Developing Chick Embryos
Collections: Cells to Self, Cycles, Diving Into the Gene Pool, Traits of Life

More to explore

Sea Urchins
Sea Urchins

Insight into genes, reproduction, and cancer

Cells to Self
Cells to Self

Explore how human cells move, communicate, and respond to their environment.

Which Embryo Is Human?

Can you tell the difference between human and nonhuman embryos?

Related exhibits

Look Inside a Developing Fish
Look Inside a Developing Fish

Use a microscope to investigate developing zebrafish eggs.

Can You Spot the Human?
Can You Spot the Human?

Guess which photos are the human embryo, egg, and sperm. 

Are Your Cells You?
Are Your Cells You?

Explore ethical and philosophical questions about the first "immortal" cell line.

Give Heart Cells a Beat
Give Heart Cells a Beat

Use your heart rate to drive the beating of human heart cells. 


IMLS acknowledgment

This web project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [MA-30-16-0175-16].

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