The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate change. But new research shows that it also set the stage for life to rebound astonishingly quickly.

New species of plankton appeared fewer than 2,000 years after the world-altering event, according to research led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and published in Geology.

Lead author Chris Lowery, a research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said that it’s a remarkably quick evolutionary feat that has never been seen before in the fossil record. Typically, new species appear on roughly million-year time frames.