The egg or the chicken

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241106132114.htm
This news article claims that nature could create eggs long before it invented chickens.
There is a single celled eukaryote (Chromosphaera perkensii) that branched off from animal cellular life forms a billion years ago before protists evolved.  It is a single celled organism that can form balls of two types of cells that look like early stage embryos, and it exists in these balls for about 1/3 of it's life cycle.
The article claims that single celled animals could form embryo like cellular complexes long before multicellular life forms evolved, but the most their work indicates is that the genes that could be used to evolve multicellular life and future embryos may have existed that could allow the evolution of the convergent trait in two divergent lineages separated by half a billion years of evolution.  It branched off from the lineage that led to multicellular life a billion years ago and some time during it's evolution since splitting off it evolved the means to form these balls of cells.  A half a billion years after the divergence the lineage of multicellular animals evolved something similar.  For all we know the lineage of multicellular animals evolved embryos half a billion years ago, and the independent lineage of C. perkensii evolved their ability more recently, unless they have evidence that these embryo like structures existed a billion years ago.
Ron Okimoto