A crumb of bread entombed thousands of years ago alongside an ancient Egyptian mummy has been discovered among a collection of previously uncatalogued items.
The microscopic morsel was unearthed during a volunteer project at Leeds Discovery Centre and is being recorded in a national database so it can be viewed and accessed by experts and the public.
Leeds Museums and Galleries curator of natural sciences Clare Brown, who supervised the project, said the breadcrumb was found alongside a host of other remarkable items.
She said: “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.”
The bread was found in Thebes and added to the collection in the 19th Century [Stuart Robinson/Leeds Museums and Galleries]
Believed to be up to 3,000 years old, records show the bread was originally found in Thebes.
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.
Stored in small, wooden trays, the items are being reviewed by volunteer Stephen Crabtree, who began working with the museum to study fossilised plants.
While cataloguing the slides he also found a mote of dust from the Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1883.
It is thought the speck landed on the deck of a ship called the Arabella, which was sailing 1,000 miles to the west of the Indonesian island.
The project was led by volunteer Stephen Crabtree [Stuart Robinson/Leeds Museums and Galleries]
Specimens of microscopic sea creatures found by the HMS Challenger are also among the array of slides.
The ship left Kent in 1872 on a mission to circumnavigate the globe and explore the deep seas for the first time.
Returning three and a half years later, the crew had gathered marine plants and animals, sea-floor deposits and rocks, which changed scientific understanding of the oceans.
Examples found in the Leeds collection today include small disc-like fossils called orbitolites, which were gathered off the coast of Fiji.
Ms Brown added: “We don’t know exactly how or where many of these slides were collected, but we do know that 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 they thought these specimens were and how much they wanted future generations to see and be inspired by them.”
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