What came first: The Chicken or the Egg?

From my standpoint, I believe that the egg came before the chicken.  Some time in prehistory, there was a chicken-like creature that laid eggs.  From one of these eggs, the chicken was born.  So the egg preceded the chicken.  So where did the chicken-like creature came from?  Like the chicken, it was born from the egg of a similar, yet different species.  And it keeps going back to the other chicken-like-like creatures, and down through dinosaurs, and then later down to the first land-dwelling egg layer, then to fish, until you arrive at the first life form on Earth.  What find to be a better question is “Just how does life evolve out non-living organic matter.” Or “How do the billions of living cells of our body form one thinking, conscience being?”  The mysteries of life really puzzle me.