Scientists and designers have unveiled what they are calling the world's first handbag made from laboratory-grown collagen derived from Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, in a project intended to demonstrate the future of sustainable leather. The teal-coloured bag goes on display at Amsterdam's Art Zoo museum beneath a replica T-rex skeleton until 11 May, after which it will be auctioned with a reported starting price of more than half a million dollars.
Three companies collaborated on the project: The Organoid Company, genomic engineering firm Organoid, and creative agency VML, who previously worked together in 2023 to produce a giant meatball combining woolly mammoth DNA with sheep cells. For this latest venture, the team extracted ancient protein fragments from dinosaur remains and inserted them into the cells of an unidentified animal to produce collagen, which was then turned into leather.
Thomas Mitchell, chief executive of The Organoid Company, acknowledged the scale of the undertaking. "There were a lot of technical challenges," he said.
Che Connon, chief executive of Lab-Grown Leather Ltd, which produced the leather from the engineered collagen, said the T. rex connection gave the material a distinctive quality that went beyond environmental credentials. "It's not just about a green alternative to leather, it's a technological upgrade," he said.
Not everyone is convinced, however. Some scientists outside the project have questioned whether the bag can genuinely carry the label of dinosaur leather. Melanie During, a Dutch vertebrate palaeontologist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said collagen survives in dinosaur bones only as fragmented traces that cannot be used to recreate T-rex skin. Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a palaeontologist at the University of Maryland, went further, saying that even perfectly matched proteins would lack the fibre structure that gives real animal leather its distinctive properties.
Mitchell said he welcomed the debate. "When you do something new for the first time, there is always criticism. It's the bedrock of scientific exploration," he said, adding that the project represented the closest anyone had come to creating something that could genuinely be called T-rex material.
(With inputs from Reuters)
