Functioning insect "mechanical gears" have been found in nature for the first time, and British scientists claimed that the insect gears beat the 300 B.C. Greeks mechanics invention, Smithsonian reported Thursday.

A new discovery has found functioning "mechanical gears" in plant-hopping insect juveniles, which they use for jumping through the rotating mechanism of their hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing teeth, researchers at Cambridge University said.

The researchers, Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, a pair of biologists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., called the insect mechanical gears the "first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure," adding that the previously thought to be solely man-made invention actually have an evolutionary precedent.

The three-millimeter long hopping insect called Issus coleoptratus uses the mechanical gears to generate a forward jump gesture by way or synchronization of the appendage rotation.

Researcher said that the main principle behind the insect mechanical gears is coordination. By swinging both legs laterally at the same fraction of a second, the planthoppers are guaranteed to jump straight forward without any probability of an off course gesture to the right or left.

The Issus "planthoppers," which are commonly found throughout North Africa and Europe were studied and observed using electron microscopes and high-speed video capture.

According to the study, which was published today in 'Science,' the high-speed video capture showed that the Issus juveniles cocked their hind legs in jumping position, then push them forward, each moving within 30 microseconds (30 millionths of a second), enabling them to jump at speeds as high as 8.7 miles per hour.

The natural mechanical gears in the hind-legs of the planthoppers have great resemblance to those found in bicycles and inside car transmissions, UPI reported.

"We usually think of gears as something that we see in human designed machinery, but we've found that that is only because we didn't look hard enough," Sutton said at the University of Bristol. "These gears are not designed; they are evolved -- representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronization in the animal world."