Odd Species of Corpse-eating Fly back from the Dead [VIDEO]

A species of fly declared extinct more than a century ago has been rediscovered, contently buzzing around the corpses it is known to feed on.

Bone skippers, as the flies are commonly known, take their name form the cracked and exposed bones of the decaying corpses they prefer to feed upon, where they appear to jump from bite to bite of decomposing flesh.

Since 2009, reports of bone skippers appearing about Europe began to surface, and the latest taxonomical research on the flies confirms the corpse-eating creatures have made a comeback.

Pierfilippo Cerretti, a researcher and fly expert at the Sapienza University of Rome, told LiveScience that the flies' jumping and skipping movements make it appear that the corpses are "alive with larvae" and similar to a fly in Italy known as the "cheese fly," the maggots of which reportedly jump out of infested cheeses.

Another unusual characteristic of the bone skipper is that they are active in the winter months, when other flies are not. Cerretti said that the fly's keen sense of smell helps it find dead animals as it flies over snow.

Until now, bone skippers' scientific record was messy and mis-categorized.

The flies' previous taxonomy "was almost completely incorrect - a mess," Cerretti told LiveScience. "If you have no good specimens, you have no good taxonomy."

Through the work of Cerretti and his colleagues, there is now a "type specimen" for one bone skipper species, the Centrophlebomyia anthropophaga, which can be used as a base from which to compare all other bone skipper types in the future.

Cerretti and his colleagues' complete taxonomical description of the bone skipper can be found in the open-access journal ZooKeys.