There were knowledge gaps about the presumed disappearance of 11 “animalist” paintings of Bernardino da Costa Lemos in the tragic fire that occurred in 1978 at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. Excluding Júlio Jesus (1928) article, with ekphrastic-historical-artistic descriptions of each of the paintings, fifty years before they disappeared, Lemos subsists in the majority of historiography as a modest painter who flourished in the late 18th century, and a disciple of Joaquim Manuel da Rocha. The location of totally unknown imagery records and documents of Lemos’s “animalistic” work required an interdisciplinary approach to Art History (micro and crypto-history of art, iconology), Literature (ekphrasis) and Biology (ecology and taxonomy). Therefore, we study these dead works; we review the biography of a “very skilled” painter, confirm the ill-fated destiny of the group and discuss the typology of the artistic program produced for the patron friar José Mayne’s Natural History cabinet.