Tulane researchers uncovered over 6,500 Maya structures in Mexico using lidar, revealing a complex settlement landscape and challenging previous assumptions about the Maya civilization’s urban and rural distribution.

During a random Google search, a researcher stumbled on a laser survey done by a Mexican environmental organization. What it revealed was astonishing.

A major Mayan urban center has been found in a recent lidar survey on the Yucatan Peninsula that includes pyramids and ball courts. The archaeologists triumphantly declare that the world is yet far away from the last major discovery under the jungles of Central America.

Who ever goes beyond page one of Google search results? Well, Luke Auld-Thomas did, and it led to the discovery of a lost city.

Luke Auld-Thomas, Ph.D. candidate in Archeology at Tulane University, made the discovery while in a small team in the southeastern state of Campeche, Mexico. He and the archeologists found pyramids, sports fields causeways connecting districts and amphitheaters in the ancient Maya city, which they took to naming Valeriana.

Recent research using advanced lidar technology has uncovered 6,674 previously unknown Maya structures in an unexplored part of Campeche, Mexico, suggesting that we have not yet come close to finding all the major Maya cities.

East of the town of Dos Lagunas, past the major highway cutting through Mexico’s south, the forest rises up in a dense wall of grasping roots, spindly branches and veils of brown and green. Beyond it lies the ruins of an old Maya city,

Archaeologists have found thousands of Maya structures and a lost city they named Valeriana in Mexico by using laser mapping technology, according to a new study.

WIRED spoke with the researchers responsible for the discovery of Valeriana, a lost Maya city in the middle of the jungle of Campeche.