Ananova:

An Australian doctor cracked open a hen egg to make his dinner - and says he found a fully formed gecko lizard inside.

Dr Peter Beaumont, 60, said: "I was cracking the eggs into a pan when I noticed one of them was all cloudy. I looked at the shell and saw a tiny gecko."

Dr Beaumont insisted the lizard had not got into the shell after he'd cracked it open because the reptile was embedded between the inner-shell and the egg's membrane.

He believes it may have crawled into the chicken to feast on an embryo - and got stuck. The egg then formed around the lizard.

"If you open up a dead chook, you sometimes see the partly-formed eggs," he said. "The gecko could have been looking for a feed and got trapped."

Dr Beaumont said eggs sometimes contained salmonella, a potentially fatal food poisoning often carried by other lizards.

"Maybe this happens all the time," he said. "Maybe geckos regularly crawl inside chickens for a feed. And this one was unlucky enough to get stuck in an egg."

Dr Beaumont has taken the egg, which he bought from a Darwin supermarket, to health experts to examine.