He did WHAT? One man hatched a chick from a shop-bought egg

At one point or another as children, we were all led astray by some loud-mouthed classmate who insisted that 'scrambled eggs are made from baby chickens.'

But it turns out that there might be some truth in that urban myth, as one shopper in the Netherlands recently discovered.

Alwyn Wils had read online that not all supermarket eggs came unfertilised, and decided to put the theory to the test. Lo and behold, after placing a dozen shop-bought quail eggs in an incubator for a month, one of them hatched into a healthy chick.

Sorry, WHAT?

Yup, you heard us right – his name is Albert and he's a happy, healthy quail chick. 

In order for an egg to be fertilised, the hen and rooster must mate prior to the formation of the egg. According to farming experts, in rare cases when a bird is not 'sexed' properly (i.e. a male is allowed onto a farm under the assumption that he is a female), mating can occur without the error being discovered.

"Friends and family think Albert is very cool and they think it's great way of thinking – that not everything is impossible if you give it a try sometimes," says Alwyn, who has even set up a YouTube channel for little Albert.

This isn't the first time a chick has been hatched from shop-bought eggs, either. Back in 2008, a women in Cheshire successfully hatched a tiny quail chick after incubating two dozen eggs.

"I came home and I couldn’t believe it when I found this little quail chick about the size of a grape scuttling around the pen," Caroline Aspin said of the extraordinary incident.

Well now. You'll think twice before your next omelette, we bet.