The apparent discovery of a previously unknown Mayan city in the Yucatan jungle by a 15-year-old Canadian boy has been dismissed as "junk science" by a US archaeologist who was also a child prodigy at the same age on the same subject.

Others think the new "city" may be a cornfield.

Young Canadian William Gadoury claims to have found that the location of Mayan cities correlated to the position of stars in the civilisation's galaxies.

When he compared star maps from ancient books with Google Earth images of the Yucatan Peninsula, he found the location of the cities corresponded with the position of stars. Larger cities even corresponded with brighter stars.