Archeologists happened upon a previously undiscovered but well-preserved Mayan stone monument while exploring Guatemala on a recent trip, they announced earlier this month. 

"We gasped and looked in, and there's the face of a king just staring straight out at us," Luke Auld-Thomas, a graduate student at Tulane University in New Orleans, told National Geographic. 

Auld-Thomas and colleagues found the monument, called a stela, in nearly pristine condition at the El Achiotal archeological site in Western Petén.