Dinosaur collagen used to create one-of-a-kind handbag

By Charlotte Van Campenhout

AMSTERDAM, April 2 (Reuters) – Scientists and designers on Thursday unveiled a handbag made with collagen derived from Tyrannosaurus rex fossils from the United States. This is a unique creation intended to demonstrate the value of laboratory-grown leather.

The teal-colored bag “was displayed on a rock in a cage beneath a replica of a T. rex at the Art Zoo museum in Amsterdam, where it will be auctioned off next month at a reported starting price of more than half a million dollars.”

Scientists behind the initiative said the material was developed from ancient protein fragments extracted from dinosaur remains which were inserted into the cell of an unidentified animal to produce collagen which was transformed “into leather”.

“There were a lot of technical challenges,” said Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company, one of three companies behind the so-called “T. rex leather” bag.

Genomic engineering company Organoid and creative agency VML, another of the companies behind the project, have already collaborated to create a giant meatball in 2023 by combining the DNA of a woolly mammoth with sheep cells.

Che Connon, CEO of Lab‑Grown ​Leather Ltd. who worked on producing the leather for the handbag from artificial collagen, said ‌T. The Rex origin gave it an extra “oomph”.

“It’s not just a green alternative to leather, it’s a technological improvement,” Connon said of lab-grown leather.

SKEPTICISM

Some scientists outside the project expressed skepticism about the term “T. rex leather,” saying material from other animals would be necessary.

Dutch vertebrate paleontologist Melanie Durant, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said collagen can only persist in dinosaur bones as fragmented traces “which cannot be used to recreate T. rex skin or leather.”

Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, also said that any collagen identified in T. rex fossils came from inside bones, not skin, and that “even perfectly tailored proteins would not have the larger-scale fiber organization that gives animal leather its distinctive properties.”

“I would say when you do something new for the first time, there’s always criticism,” Mitchell responded.

“And I think we’re really grateful for that review. It’s the foundation of scientific exploration…I think it’s the closest thing that anyone has been able to get and probably will ever be able to create something that is a T. rex.”

(Reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout, editing by Andrew Cawthorne)