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Tardigrades, also called "water bears," were revived after being frozen for over 30 years by a team from the National Institute of Polar Research. The researchers recently released a video of the awesome creatures, slowly reviving from their long slumber.

It was in May 2014, that 0.2 millimeter-long tardigrades were found in a frozen moss sample sourced from Antarctica in November 1983. The team found in it a couple of specimens with one egg. One of these lived through it and the one that hatched from the egg reproduced.

It was a gradual recovery process, yet it took a fortnight for the tardigrade to crawl, after which it laid 19 eggs. Among these, 14 hatched into healthy offspring. "The time taken for the first laid egg to hatch was almost double the median time, 19 days, of all of the eggs, but the surviving offspring appeared to be healthy. The other revived tardigrade died approximately 20 days after rehydration despite showing initial promise," according to HNGN.

The creature that hatched from the frozen egg had no problems, and laid 15 eggs, out of which just seven hatched.

Over the 30-plus years of cryptobiosis, it was expected that the long recovery and time required for the first egg to hatch may show that there were damages. Yet there was no visible damage in the creature produced from the revived egg.

"Our team now aims at unraveling the mechanisms underlying the long-term survival of cryptobiotic organisms by studying damage to tardigrades' DNA and their ability to repair it," Megumu Tsujimto, lead researcher of the study, said in a press release.

The study has been published in the February issue of Cryptobiology.

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