Ever since she was eight years old, Valeria Susa knew she wanted to be a biologist.

Instead of dolls, I had bears and animals, and I put them a little classroom and explained them what a flower was.

And I was really tiny doing that. So it was really what I was meant to be.

Today, Valeria is a microbial ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

And back in 1999, her work would bring her to a place on earth like no other.

In the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico, there's a valley shaped like a butterfly.

It's called Quattrocyanagas Basin.

It's filled with dry grasses and white sand dunes and is surrounded by mountains.

Valeria says that they look like titans were playing with Plato.

And this butterfly-shaped valley is dotted with gleaming pools of water. Hundreds of them.

Some are big, some are small, and some are a hypnotizing shade of blue. The water is a dreamy gradient, slowly deepening from the

perimeter in, crystal clear around the edges, then a glittering turquoise, and then in the

center of the pool, the deepest indigo your eyes can comprehend. And when Valeria looked into these pools, she discovered that she could peek through time

into the ancient past.

It is amazingly beautiful, hundred times more magical that you can imagine.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we visit Quattrocianagus, and we gaze into one of its pools.

And what it shows us is a portrait of some of the earliest life on Earth.

It's an almost magical phenomenon,

and it may soon disappear.

That's after this. When we arrived to Patacienegas, we arrived in 99, in a dusty pickup,

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