A 3000-year-old bread crumb has been found among a collection of previously uncatelogued items in a British museum.

The microscopic morsel was unearthed during a volunteer project at Leeds Discovery Centre in the UK, and is currently being recorded in a national database.

According to the BBC, Leeds Museums and Galleries curator of natural sciences Clare Brown, who supervised the project, said the bread crumb was found among a number of other remarkable items.

“Discovering Egyptian bread was particularly surprising, and the fact we can connect the Leeds collection to bread baked thousands of years ago on a different continent is fascinating,” she said.

According to the BBC, records show the bread morsel was originally found in Thebes, and in the 19th Century it was collected and preserved by an unknown Victorian microscopist and has since been stored as part of a collection of hundreds of previously uncatalogued slides.

Volunteer Stephen Crabtree is reviewing  the slides, which are stored in small wooden trays. While cataloguing the slides he also found a mote of dust from the Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883. It is thought the speck of dust landed on the deck of the ship Arabella, which was sailing 1000 miles to the west of the Indonesian island.

Ms Brown said although they don’t know where or when the slides were collected, each one of them was meticulously preserved for study and posterity by a diligent microscopist more than a century ago.

“That in itself is evidence of how important these specimens were and how much they wanted future generations to see and be inspired by them,” she said.