Jurassic purse: Handbag made from 'T-Rex leather' on auction could fetch $800K

The “World’s first T-Rex leather product,” as it’s been trademarked by its scientific and artistic creators, could fetch up to 500,000 Euros (CAD$800,000) when bidding starts at a hotel in Paris, France Thursday evening.

Some people within the scientific community, however, are skeptical about whether the lab-grown leather truly comes from the iconic Cretaceous era animal.

Here’s what to know about the alleged prehistoric purse.

In 2005, researchers in the U.S. identified soft tissue in the bones of a 68-million-year-old specimen, a finding which “rocked the world of dinosaur research,” Discover magazine reported at the time, per the University of Montana.

Until then, it was believed that organic material couldn’t survive for millions of years.

“Now, with these new discoveries of cellular preservation, we move to a new kind of paleontology: cellular and molecular paleontology,” said Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and co-author of a paper on the findings.

Last year, The Organoid Company, a genomic engineering firm, and creative agency VML teamed up with sustainable biotechnology pioneer Lab-Grown Leather to use collagen sequences found in fossilized tissue to “develop and produce a high-quality alternative to traditional leather that is both animal-friendly and environmentally responsible.”

“Using advanced computational biology and AI modelling, scientists predicted and reconstructed the remaining genetic information” and inserted it into a “carrier cell line” to produce a collagen-based hide.

“It’s like having a puzzle, but you only have a few pieces, and then you have to fill in the rest,” Organoid CEO Thomas Mitchell said in an Instagram video.

He also told Reuters they experienced “a lot of technical challenges” along the way.

As it happens, Organoid and VML were also involved in the creation and marketing of the 2023 novelty woolly mammoth meatball, which used elephant DNA to fill in gaps and sheep stem cells to grow the “meat,” The Guardian reported.

When Mitchell and company first announced their project’s success, it was met with skepticism by some who questioned whether the protein fragments extracted from the fossilized collagen sequences were, in fact, from the T. rex and not some other source that made its way into the remains over millions of years.

“The boundary that we usually hold up for how long proteins can survive was only recently pushed back to around 20 million in very exceptional circumstances,” Postdoctoral researcher Jan Dekker from the University of Turin told German news outlet DW .

Because the T. rex died off in the asteroid-caused mass extinction event some 60 million years ago, Dekker doubts there’s any dino-DNA in the lab-grown leather.

He added that even if protein fragments from T. rex DNA were evident, most of the completed sequence would be from the other animal used: chicken.

“What they have done is create synthetic collagen using an AI model trained on a variety of different species, mainly chicken,” Dekker said. “A very interesting development in itself, but it is not a dinosaur. In fact, it’s more chicken than anything else.”

Meanwhile, vertebrate paleontologist Melanie During of the Vrije Universiteit ​Amsterdam told Reuters that any persisting collagen from inside bones couldn’t be used to create skin or leather, and Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of ​Maryland, said even proteins that matched flawlessly wouldn’t have the larger-scale fibre organization necessary to create the properties of animal leather.

With a focus on accessories as their product’s initial commercial applications, the companies wanted “a flagship luxury item” for their launch and chose “avant-garde techwear label Enfin Levé” and Polish designer Michel Hadas to craft the handbag.

“The bag is deliberately restrained — an architectural silhouette with silver fittings that include a lost-wax cast buckle and a cold-forged element shaped like a DNA double helix,” reads a review by Emirates Woman.

“That helix is a quiet reference to the material’s lab-born origins, and it is one of the few decorative gestures on an object that otherwise lets the leather speak for itself.”

Once the purse is auctioned off, the companies intend to produce more of their T-Rex leather and make it commercially available to other brands and designers.

“Initial applications will focus on luxury accessories, with long-term ambitions extending into fashion, automotive, and other high-performance material sectors,” they explain.

“This material is fully biodegradable while retaining the durability and repairability of traditional leather, thus offering a sustainable, ethical, and traceable alternative to future generations of consumers committed to innovation and environmental responsibility.”

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