Supersized hen egg in Texas had another egg inside

ABILENE, Texas (AP) - A Texas woman who discovered an egg the size of a baseball in her chicken coop was even more surprised by what she found when she cracked it open: another full egg.

Cookie Smith of Abilene found what she calls the "mutant super egg" in her three-hen, two-nest coop earlier this week.

"I just died laughing when I saw it," she said. "I brought it in to show (husband) Leonard, and he just said, 'Bless her heart.'"

It was an inch longer and three times heavier than a normal egg. Smith initially took pictures of the egg and showed photos to her co-workers at an Abilene hospital.

"One of the doctors said he's nearly 80 years old and he'd never seen anything like it," she said.

She cracked it open only after an Abilene Reporter-News photographer accompanied her home. When she cracked open the enormous egg, inside was a large yolk - and another intact normal-sized egg.

Smith said the eggs may have been OK to eat, but she opted to pass.

According to a web video by the National History Museum in the United Kingdom, such a "double egg" is relatively rare. One forms when "unusual contractions" force a developing egg traveling down an oviduct back into the ovary. There, it is surrounded by another egg, with the concentric eggs being delivered as one.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.