THIS ethereal image reveals, for the first time, a millimetre-accurate glimpse of Earth as it was when dinosaurs roamed. It is one of a set created by photographer Dan Holdsworth and geologist Mark Allan to visualise some of the planet’s hidden vistas.

The image is of a limestone layer in Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux in the Jura mountains, from a series entitled Continuous Topography , and is the fruit of three years’ fieldwork. These strata, unique to the Jura, forced 19th-century scientists to rethink their chronology of Earth’s development …