HEY, KID, YOU THE ‘MAYAN!’

Teen finds lost city

A Canadian teenager has discovered the remains of a lost Mayan city — without ever stepping foot in Mexico. Combining his love for the night sky and a childhood fascination with the Mayan “doomsday” calendar, 15-year-old William Gadoury (right), of Quebec, used satellite imagery and star charts to uncover what is believed to be one of the largest Mayan settlements to ever have existed. “I was really surprised and excited when I realized that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities,” Gadoury told the Journal de Montreal newspaper. Dubbed K’aak Chi — which means Fire Mouth — the forgotten city was found buried deep in the Yucatan jungle, hidden beneath the region’s dense vegetation. “There are linear features that would suggest there is something underneath that big canopy,” Daniel De Lisle, of the Canadian Space Agency, told The Independent. “There are enough items to suggest it could be a man-made structure.” In order to find the ancient settlement, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan constel- lations from the ancient Madrid Codex texts.

He learned that if he projected the constellations onto a map of the Yucatan Peninsula, the shapes matched up perfectly with the locations of 117 Mayan cities.

Surprisingly, according to Le Journal De Montréal, the teen was the first person to test such a theory.

But rather than stop there, Gadoury took his research a step further — examining one last constellation that contained three stars, with only two of them corresponding to known Mayan cities.

He then obtained satellite images from the Canadian Space Agency, projected them on Google Earth and found exactly what he had predicted: geometric shapes indicating that an ancient Mayan city with a pyramid and 30 buildings once stood in the region.