Tiny, tiny egg makes big claim

He has at least one very, very, very tiny egg.

Like, world record tiny.

"No pun intended, but I will say when you have the world's smallest chicken egg you can also have the world's smallest omelet," said Russell, a Raleigh County farmer who preaches at Rock Creek Community Church.

The little egg made its public debut Thursday at an event in state Agriculture Commissioner Gus Douglass' office.

Russell produced a small medicine bottle and a basket. In that basket, a dozen eggs were placed.

From the medicine bottle, a tiny miracle was extracted and placed next to its larger counterparts. Dwarfed by the 12 other others in the basket, there was no doubt that the tiny egg was some sort of record.

"At times it's amazing what you can find in these hills of West Virginia," Douglass proclaimed after seeing the world's smallest egg on his desk.

Russell collected the egg, which is hardly bigger than a dime, on July 28 in the chicken coop on his Rock Creek farm in Raleigh County with his wife, Karen.

"We were both looking at it with our mouths open. It's something that took every word from us," he said.

He knew he had something special, so he took it to the state Department of Agriculture to be weighed on scientific scales in the Regulatory and Environmental Affairs Division dairy laboratory.

The egg weighed in on Aug. 9 at .122 ounces, .82 inches long and .66 inches wide.

That's tiny enough to be designated as the world's smallest chicken egg by the World Records Academy. A certificate proclaiming it as such was given to Russell on Thursday.