The gnat larva was alive well before the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth (Picture: CN-IGME CSIC/SWNS)

Scientists have discovered the oldest example of a tiny biting insect on a Mediterranean beach.

The fossil, found on Mallorca, shows a pristine example of a gnat larva that crawled over the ground around 247 million years ago – before the continents began to form.

Researchers are able to make out the digestive system and head of the creature, and even tell how it was able to breathe.

It is several millions of years older than the previous record holder for a gnat, which was found in France.

The insects belong to a group called dipterans that also includes mosquitoes and midges.

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.’

Researchers were excited to see the preserved external breathing structures (or spiracles) of the fossil (Picture: CN-IGME CSIC/SWNS)

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.

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The oldest ever example of the tiny bloodsucking irritant was discovered on a Spanish beach.