Tiny, annoying, flying pests may appear as old as time. Gnats are the common name for a bunch of species in the diptera suborder Nematocera, which the Smithsonian describes as “non-biting flies, no larger than a handful of grains of salt, [that] are attracted to fluids secreted by your eyes.” 

Whilst their typical lifespan is only about a week lengthy, their survival by way of evolutionary history stretches way additional. According to new study, the insects could have been about 247 million years, older than the earliest dinosaurs. 

In a new study published March ten in the journal Papers in Paleontology, geologists and biologists from Spain and England delved into a lately found fossil that can teach us much more about the beginnings, and remarkable survival skills, of the gnat. The fossil was located in a modest harbor in Estellencs, positioned in Spain’s Balearic Islands, identified for its bluish rock layers that hide remains of plants, insects, fish, and much more from the Middle Triassic. 

[Related: When insects got wings, evolution really took off.]

Mallorcan scientist Josep Juárez spotted the find—a total larva sample that left an imprint on the sides of a split rock. Upon additional examination, the properly-preserved fossil was identified as aspect of the insect order that now claims mosquitoes, midges, flies, and of course, gnats. It could be the oldest diptera specimen found to date, and could be a frequent ancestor to the much more than million species in the group nowadays.

Protoanisolarva juarezi, the gnat larva representing the oldest-identified diptera, 247 million years old, located in Mallorca, Spain.CN-IGME CSIC.

“While I was inspecting it beneath the microscope, I place a drop of alcohol on it to enhance the contrast of the structures,” says study author Enrique Peñalver, a scientist from the Spanish National Analysis Council at the Spanish Geological Survey, stated in a press release. “I was in a position to witness in awe how the fossil had preserved each the external and internal structures of the head, some components of the digestive method, and, most importantly, the external openings to its respiratory method, or spiracles.”

But beyond just revealing what a infant gnat looked like at the time, the existence of this fossil shows the insect’s outstanding potential to adapt to what Oxford University Museum of Organic History’s Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente referred to as a “post apocalyptic atmosphere.” 

[Related: Eyeless army ants chomped their way through Europe millions of years ago.]

The Permian-Triassic extinction occurred about the final 15 million years of the Permian period, and is well-known for the extinction of about 95 % of marine species and 70 % of terrestrial species in such a, evolutionarily speaking, quick period of time. (Some scientists even propose that the bulk of these species disappeared more than a 20,000-year span ideal at the finish of the period.) It is identified as the most extreme of any big extinction episodes in Earth’s recorded history, wiping out much more than half of the taxonomic groups that roamed the land and seas. Prospective causes involve a adjust in the planet’s atmosphere that led to radiation poisoning or a adjust in oxygen levels.

The authors of the new study also noted how this newly found specimen has a comparable breathing method to that in some modern day insects. Maybe it is time to add gnats to the quick list of animals that could survive an apocalypse alongside tardigrades and cockroaches.