Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more

Summary

How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions. Last week, on October 1st, 2026, the historian Benjamin Breen published a post called Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness account of the dodo. He used AI to search digitized records from the Dutch East India Company. The Company dominated the spice trade and ran a string of ports across Asia from 1602 until it collapsed under its debts and was dissolved in 1799. A project called GLOBALISE has turned millions of the Company’s handwritten pages into searchable text. Searching those transcriptions with AI, Breen found a 1615 ship’s journal in which sailors on Mauritius “caught many tortoises, dodos”. A new eyewitness record of the extinct dodo, sitting in plain sight for four hundred years. I read the article and immediately thought, I can do this. Not because I’m a historian, but because I’m a software engineer who happens to be very adept at piloting AI agents and creating agentic workflows. Breen’s post was the inspiration, and I wanted to extend the approach: I could search for many different historical mysteries in parallel, and I could chain together a few different AI models to filter results and automate a few of the cumbersome, time consuming manual steps. But the appeal went beyond the technical challenge. I think there’s something honorable about adding to what we know. Adding even one new data point to a couple of niche fields felt like a small but worthwhile contribution to make. I thought it would be really cool if I could do that. I powered on my small but capable home AI lab and got to work. The Plan I started by asking an AI “Deep Research” assistant a question: which open historical questions are most likely to be solvable with data that already exists online? It came back with thirteen candidates, ranked by how complete and accessible the data was, how much AI could help, whether anyone had already done it, and, most importantly, whether an answer could be checked against an original page. That last one matters more than it sounds. AI models can be confidently wrong, so every claim had to end at a real document: a scan of the actual handwritten letter or the actual printed newspaper, with an archive reference that anyone can look up and read for themselves. The list included anima…