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Shell-shocked: Irish man finds egg inside egg
It's no yolk to find something unexpected inside your breakfast egg.
And one man found a very rare phenomenon -- another egg inside his egg.
When Adrian Sheehan collected the eggs one morning last week he found one of his three hens had laid an unusually large egg.
"At first I thought it was just unusually big and I was going to eat it,'' said Mr Sheehan who keeps a "backyard flock" of Cuckoo Marans at his home near Killarney, Co Kerry.
"But when I peeled back the shell, I found a second egg inside.
"Anyone I showed it to was amazed and had never seen anything like it.
"You'd sometimes come across two yolks in the one shell but I had never heard of anything like this before."
The phenomena known as 'ovum in ovo' or 'egg in an egg' is rare -- a one in a four million chance -- but has been documented in New Zealand, Texas and in Somerset in the UK in 2009.
Mr Sheehan plans to preserve the shells that have caused such a stir.
"They have examples of it in museums. It's even thought to be a symbol of good luck in China so maybe the politicians will want a rub off it," he said.
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