The Dodo

A historian used Anthropic's Opus 5.5 model to comb through digitised early modern archival texts and uncovered a previously unknown eyewitness record of the dodo. The find has drawn attention for showing how large language models can aid archival research, surfacing documents historians had missed even as debates continue over AI's reliability in scholarship.

Veterinarians in Ukraine stopped to help an animal lying motionless in an active war zone, believing it was dead — until it suddenly moved. The rescue, documented by animal welfare outlet The Dodo, shows the vets giving the animal emergency care. Viewers are moved by the team risking danger to save an animal amid the ongoing war.

A researcher reports using Anthropic's Opus 5.5 AI model to identify a previously unknown eyewitness account of the dodo, the extinct flightless bird of Mauritius. The finding, described on the Res Obscura history blog, is drawing attention for showing how large language models can aid archival discovery in historical research.