Epic win

Why be a fun sponge on this one?

Because it is most likely not a genuine finding. An updated version of the comments under the story to which kl linked:

http://gizmodo.com/experts-doubt-that-a-teen-found-a-lost-maya-city-1775985640

Far from wanting to scotch any fun, I find Maya archaeology totally fascinating, and I think it's more worth anyone's time to do some more reading into it than reading some superficial, sensationalist, and ultimately false news story about it.

It's a 15 year old kid who found some Mayan buildings / city / town / caravan park using his smarts & the internet, instead of sitting around watching TV.

As the Mayanists say, it remains to be explored on the ground, but he neither seems to have found any Maya buildings, nor is his theory of a match with star constellations likely to hold any water. I find it most preposterous how he then gives his 'site' some made-up pseudo-name like the first explorers of Mayan ruins sometimes did (or, as in the case of Teoberto Maler, even scratched their name into walls).

There is no doubt that a lot of sites remain to be found. The way I understand Maya archaeology, there were countless sites because Mesoamerica was very densely inhabited, and it isn't actually very difficult to accidentally stumble on an unexplored site. The cities that we have found so far are probably only a small fraction of those that existed, and I think many of them have been found mainly because they were not destroyed in wars but abandoned as they stood.

There may have been many more cities, such as several apparently significant ones of which we know as losers in wars from Mayan writings. These places may have been destroyed and not been re-inhabited after those wars, and will likely continue to elude us for some time. There are thousands and thousands of hills covered by jungle that may really be mounds of remains, and they most likely wouldn't show up on an aerial image as geometric structures, because they will have been covered completely by the jungle. Even most of the iconic Maya remains of major sites such as Chichén Itza had to be excavated before they could become tourist magnets.

Some of the sites, like Tikal, easily rival the largest European remains of ancient cities, and there is always the factor to be considered that the largest number of buildings then were probably found in wooden shanty towns of which few remains would have survived until today, and which are difficult to document archaeologically.

Anyway, I wish he was right, as I enjoy it when new discoveries are made, but I'm afraid the days of dilettantes like Heinrich Schliemann are long in the past.