Scientists and fashion designers today unveiled a bag made from collagen derived from T. rex (T. rex) Tyrannosaurus fossils found in the US, a unique creation whose purpose is to prove the value of lab-grown leather.
The bag, in teal, was displayed on a rock in a cage under a dinosaur effigy at Amsterdam’s Art Zoo museum, where it will be auctioned next month with a reported starting price of more than half a million dollars.
The scientists who had this initiative said the material was developed using ancient protein fragments extracted from dinosaur fossils, which were inserted into the cell of another animal (they did not specify which one) to produce collagen and, from that, skin.
“The technical challenges were many,” said Thomas Mitchell, chief executive of The Organoid Company, one of three companies involved in the project to create the “tyrannosaur skin bag”. The Organoid Genome Engineering Company and advertising conglomerate VML, another of the companies involved in the project, had also collaborated in 2023 to create a giant meatball by combining the DNA of a woolly mammoth with sheep cells. Che Connon, chief executive of Lab-Grown Leather Ltd, which worked to produce the bag’s leather from the modified collagen, said the fact that it came from Tyrannosaurus Rex gave it added momentum.
“It’s not just an eco-friendly alternative to leather, it’s a technological upgrade,” she said of the lab-grown leather.
Some scientists unconnected to this project have expressed reservations about the term “Tyrannosaurus Rex skin”, arguing that material from other animals is required.
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Dutch vertebrate palaeontologist Melanie Durring from the Free University of Amsterdam argued that collagen can only remain in dinosaur bones as trace fragments, which cannot be used to recreate tyrannosaur skin. A similar view was expressed by Thomas R. Holtz Jr, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, who explained that the collagen in the fossils came from the inside of the bones, not the skin.
“When you do something new for the first time, there’s always criticism,” Mitchell replied. “And we’re really grateful for that criticism. It’s the foundation of scientific research,” he explained.
