A regular egg weighs about an ounce. A jumbo store-bought egg? Around 2.5 ounces. But one family’s backyard hen just laid a monster—tipping the scales at over six ounces.
Rob Griffin, 38, and his daughters were in for a shock when their chicken, Gail, laid an egg nearly three times the size of a standard egg. The family, who live in England, initially thought it was some kind of prank. It wasn’t.
Gail spent five long hours laying this behemoth. When Griffin’s eldest daughter pulled it out of the hutch, she couldn’t believe what she was holding. “It was the size of an ostrich egg,” Griffin said.
Naturally, curiosity took over. Griffin grabbed the egg, cracked it open, and got the second shock of the day—a whole separate egg was inside. His daughter called it a “double yolker.” He corrected her: “double egger.”
The second egg wasn’t just a weird lump or an empty shell—it was a fully formed egg with its own yolk. If you’re keeping score, that’s one hen, one exhausting afternoon, and two complete eggs in one shell.
Gail, along with another hen named Dorothy, has been part of the Griffin family for about a year. But this was a first. Even Griffin, who’s been raising chickens for a while, had no idea this could happen.
“We couldn’t believe it,” he said. “We thought it was just going to be a double yolk, but when the second egg fell out, we were in shock.”
Nature has a way of throwing curveballs, and this one came straight from the chicken coop. Gail might need a break after this, but she’s officially earned her place as the queen of the henhouse.
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Five Fast Facts
- The largest chicken egg ever recorded weighed over a pound and had a double yolk and a second egg inside.
- Ostrich eggs can weigh up to 5 pounds—about 24 times the size of a regular chicken egg.
- Some chickens can lay double-yolk eggs regularly, but a fully formed egg inside another is extremely rare.
- The world’s oldest recorded chicken lived to be 16 years old.
- Before commercial egg production, backyard hens were the primary source of eggs for most families.
