I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorites and More
A software engineer describes using AI agents to analyze millions of digitized historical records from the Dutch East India Company. By automating the search process, the author successfully uncovered previously unknown historical data, including records of extinct species and geological events.
Why it matters
It demonstrates the potential for AI-driven research to accelerate historical discovery and unlock insights from massive, previously inaccessible archives.
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.
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