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.