A doctoral candidate at the Northern Arizona University has accidentally discovered a long-lost Mayan city — now named Valeriana by archaeologists — in Mexico. The city, now buried under the forest 50 sq. miles off Campeche, is estimated to have flourished between 750 and 850AD.
Anthropologist Luke Auld-Thomas stumbled onto the find when he revisited a 2013 survey done for a forest monitoring project using the Lidar remote sensing technology to generate 3D images of the site. Researchers now suggest there may be many more such lost cities to be found.