Melbourne, May 18 : A man was shell-shocked, quite literally, when he cracked an egg while preparing a meal and to his astonishment found a fully formed gecko inside the shell.

60-year-old Dr Peter Beaumont, was bewildered to see the lizard when he broke an egg while preparing Thai fishcakes for dinner.

"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," The Daily Telegraph quoted him, as saying.

While speaking to the Northern Territory News, the Darwin resident was convinced that the lizard did not creep into the shell when he threw it off, as the reptile was trapped between the inner shell and the egg's membrane.

He reasoned the presence of the lizard in the egg by saying that the gecko could have crawled into the chicken for eating an embryo and got stuck accidentally. And later the egg was formed around it and was finally bought by Beaumont at a normal supermarket.

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

Also, he thinks that this first of its kind discovery may also lead to some clue that may aid in explaining that occasional food poisoning in humans.

He said that the eggs sometimes contained salmonella, which is a potentially fatal food poisoning and is usually carried by other lizards.

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