Dunno about any serious scientific inquiries into the answer but I always thought the answer is egg. At some point the modern chicken has come into being as the progeny of two pre-modern chickens, however it had to be an egg before it could be a chicken and its parents couldn't have been modern chickens.
However, all that presupposes that you can draw a line in the evolutionary history of the modern (extant) chicken and say this is modern and what goes before is not. I dunno if that really can be done.
Edit: came across this guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/may/26/uknews
"Whether chicken eggs preceded chickens hinges on the nature of chicken eggs," said panel member and philosopher of science David Papineau at King's College London.
"I would argue it's a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg. By this reasoning, the first chicken did indeed come from a chicken egg, even though that egg didn't come from chickens."
And from Prof. Brookfield of the University of Nottingham:
The first chicken must have differed from its parents by some genetic change, perhaps a very subtle one, but one which caused this bird to be the first ever to fulfil our criteria for truly being a chicken; Thus the living organism inside the eggshell would have had the same DNA as the chicken that it would develop into, and thus would itself be a member of the species of chicken
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