On a Mediterranean shore, researchers found the earliest instance of a tiny biting insect.
The preserved fossil was discovered on the island of Mallorca and depicts a gnat larva that traveled across the ground about 247 million years ago, before the continents started to form.
The creature’s skull and digestive system can be seen, and researchers can even determine how it breathed.
It outdates the previous record-holding gnat, discovered in France, by several million years.
The insects are part of a class of creatures known as dipterans, which also includes midges and mosquitoes.
Scientists believe the latest find could hold the key to revealing how life recovered from the Earth’s biggest ever mass extinction, which wiped out 95% of all species around 250 million years ago.
Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, was an author on the study that revealed the important discovery.
He said: ‘We have been able to look at some of the adaptations by the first dipterans to the post-apocalyptic environment at the beginning of the Triassic, for instance, a breathing system that is still found in different groups of insects today.’
The larva has been named after Josep Juárez, the man who discovered it during a palaeontological survey in the area near the small harbour of Estellencs at the northeast of Mallorca.
It will be called Protoanisolarva juarezi, or ‘Juárez’s ancestral anisopodoid larva’.
The first author on the study is Dr Enrique Peñalver, who works for the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Spanish Geological Survey (CN-IGME).
He said: ‘While I was inspecting it under the microscope, I put a drop of alcohol on it to increase the contrast of the structures, and I was able to witness in awe how the fossil had preserved both the external and internal structures of the head, some parts of the digestive system, and, most importantly, the external openings to its respiratory system, or spiracles.’
Last month, the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain was found in the head of a 319 million-year-old fish that was pulled out of an English coal mine around a century ago.