NEARLY 500 previously unseen photographs of the legendary British rock band The Beatles, taken on the set of their 1965 movie Help!, have been discovered after 35 years in storage at the University of Dundee, Scotland.

The pictures had been taken by photographer Michael Peto, who willed them to the university after his death in 1970. However, the pictures saw the light of day only recently when the institution was preparing the collection for digital storage.

The pictures have been published in new book Now These Days Are Gone.

Editor Robbie Elson said the photographs were unique because they offer a candid picture of the famous pop stars that would be impossible to capture in the present day.

"The pictures are so extraordinary because of the access. You just wouldn’t get such unstaged, candid pictures of pop stars these days. Unfortunately, a lot of these pictures are a mystery, Michael Peto was not an archivist and left us very little information with his work," Contactmusic quoted him, as saying.

"I found it almost impossible to believe that someone took all these pictures of the biggest band in history and did not mention them to anyone. We think Peto was commissioned by a paper but no one ever printed them. The mystery remains," he added. — ANI