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

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 dominat...