Specimens of earliest bugs that fed on blood have been unearthed in China.

Previously known evidence of bloodsucking insects was 100 million years old but the newly discovered bugs lived some 30 million years earlier.

The fossils identify two new species and they are the most ancient evidence of blood-feeding "true bugs," according to a recent study published in Current Biology, a scientific journal that specializes in all areas of biology.

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As stated in the study, the bugs may have even sucked dinosaurs' blood,

True bugs, or alternately called Hemiptera by biologists, have mouthparts for piercing and sucking fluids. Unlike butterflies and honeybees, they can't furl their mouthparts.

All true bugs are insects but not all insects are true bugs. Modern bloodsucking insects belong mostly to four orders: fleas, lice, true flies such as mosquitoes and true bugs.

The latter three have been recorded living 66 million years ago to the present.

Specimens of the newly discovered bugs were found by two researchers, Dong Ren and Yuzhi Yao, of Capital Normal University.

Together with their team, they studied 400 insects in the early Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Northeastern China.

Seven true bug specimens indicated traces of iron in their systems, which signify blood meals.

By fossilization data, researchers branded three of the seven bloodsucking bugs into two new genus inside a new family, Torirostratidae.

A report from IFLScience, a social website that deals with current scientific issues, classified the names of the new true bugs.

According to the report, one of the two species of true bugs was named Flexicorpus acutirostratus. "Flexi" is the Latin word for "soft" while "corpus" for "body." The new species was 10 millimeters long.

The other was two millimeters longer and was named Torirostratus pilosus from the Latin word "torosus" which means "bulges" and "rostarus" for beaked.

TagsCurrent Biology, China bugs