Student finds long lost ancient Mayan city in dense jungle by ACCIDENT using Google that was ‘hidden in plain sight’

A HUGE ancient Mayan city, that had disappeared for centuries, has accidentally been found by a student using Google.

Thousands of undiscovered structures have been located at the long-lost city Valeriana, in the South of Mexico.

Archaeologists noted the city had been “hidden in plain sight” under a jungle just 15 minutes away from a major road.

The ancient site, named after a nearby lagoon, is also thought to be the second largest Mayan area, just behind Calakmul.

This shocking discovery was made after Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US, scrolled through Google.

He explained how he noticed something interesting “by accident” while online, according to the .

The PhD student said: “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring.”

Auld-Thomas noticed the huge ancient city when he processed the data.

Valeriana, made up of three sites and around the size of Edinburgh, is thought to have been home to around 30,000 to 50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

Archaeologists have found pyramids, sports fields, and amphitheatres at the ancient site.

They used Lidar scanning technology, which fires lasers from a plane to map a covered site, to find these structures.

Researchers shared there was still more to learn about this site as “no-one has ever been there.”

Archaeologists added that they were unsure why the city was eventually abandoned by the Mayan people.

These findings have challenged previous beliefs that the ancient Mayan people lived in isolated villages.

Auld-Thomas revealed what challenges could come from this extraordinary find.

He said: "One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study."

There are no pictures of the extraordinary site as nobody has visited the location yet.

The PhD student added: “I've got to go to Valeriana at some point. It's so close to the road, how could you not?

“But I can't say we will do a project there.”

Auld-Thomas also explained how the use of technology helped reveal the sheer size of the area.

He said: “For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total.

“That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”