Most great archaeological discoveries involve years of fieldwork, dense jungle, and a lot of digging. This one involved a guy clicking through page after page of Google results, the kind of Internet rabbit hole most of us only tumble into when we’re bored at home.

Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University, was deep in a search when he found it. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC in 2024.

That laser survey turned out to contain an entire ancient Mayan city, hidden under forest cover for centuries.

The survey used LiDAR, a mapping technique that fires laser pulses from a plane or satellite to measure distances to the ground. When you strip away the tree canopy from the data, you can see what’s underneath: in this case, pyramids, causeways, sports fields, amphitheaters, and thousands of........

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