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

This handbag made from lab-grown 'T-Rex leather' could fetch upwards of $800,000 at auction. Photo by VML

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

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

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How did they make the T-Rex leather?

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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.

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

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“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.

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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.”

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“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.

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“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.

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

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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.

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Why are some scientists skeptical?

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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.

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“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.

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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.