A group of Japanese high school students took a crack at one of life’s enduring philosophical mysteries when they successfully grew a chicken from an egg outside of its shell.

In video of the 21-day experiment posted to YouTube earlier this month, the biology students from Oihama High School in Chiba can be seen breaking open fertilized brown eggs they got from the grocery store onto plastic wrap stretched over a cup.

Both the plastic and the cup are filled with a chemical solution to help the chick develop and another sheet of plastic is stretched over the egg.

The students then punch ventilation holes in the plastic to provide the embryo with oxygen before the eggs are placed in an incubator where the runny breakfast food undergoes a miraculous transformation.

The teens cannot contain their excitement when by day 3, they discover that inside of the yolk is a beating heart.

The blastoderm, a layer of cells formed at one pole of the yolk, is noticeably more developed five days later and begins to spread around the yolk to form an embryo.

After a week, the students are able to see the formation of veins around the yolk.

After just three weeks, an entire chick is formed and seen curled up in the plastic wrap where just a yolk once stood. The video then shows the fluffy baby chick happily running around the classroom.

According to a scientific paper published in the Japan Poultry Science Association about the experiment, the chickens were bred to maturation and they produced healthy offspring.

The video claims that this was the first time in history that a chicken was born without its shell but the experiment was first detailed by Dr. Cynthia Fisher in a US Biology textbook in 1993, according to the Daily Mail Online.

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