Engineer's AI pipeline over 400 years of archives finds forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos
A software engineer, inspired by historian Benjamin Breen's use of Claude Opus 5.5 to find a new dodo eyewitness account, built an AI research pipeline with Claude Code: a cheap "System One" decision model, Jev, first filters huge volumes of passages (reading 59,000 elephant mentions cost about $3), Claude Haiku then reads, translates and extracts dates and places, and a Claude Code agent checks transcriptions against scans of the original manuscripts. The run processed GLOBALISE's 4.35 million transcribed pages of Dutch East India Company records in a single 12-hour overnight pass. The author reports finding an 1812 reprint in the Java Government Gazette of a Bombay letter describing a meteorite fall near Pandharpur, which if confirmed would be the earliest recorded fall in Maharashtra by 26 years, plus archival details of Javan rhinoceroses sent as gifts to the King of Kandy dying en route in 1738–1740.
It shows a layered agentic workflow — cheap model for filtering, larger model for close reading, agent for source verification — working in a non-coding domain such as history, while the author stresses that human judgment still drives the investigation.
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 builds AI agents and agentic workflows for a living, through my applied AI consultancy, JTPCK. 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.
#Anthropic#Claude Code#Claude Haiku#Claude Opus 5.5#Jev#GLOBALISE