Scientists and designers have unveiled a striking new handbag crafted from lab-grown leather derived from collagen linked to Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex) fossils, in what they say is a bold demonstration of next-generation materials.
The teal-coloured bag is on display at Amsterdam’s Art Zoo museum, perched on a rock inside a cage beneath a replica of a T. rex. It will remain there until May 11, after which it is set to be auctioned, with a reported starting price of over half a million dollars.
According to the team behind the project, the material was developed using ancient protein fragments extracted from dinosaur remains. These fragments were inserted into an unidentified animal's cell to produce collagen, which was then processed into leather.
“There were a lot of technical challenges,” said Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company, one of three firms involved in the project.
The initiative is a collaboration between genomic engineering firm Organoid, creative agency VML, and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd. Notably, Organoid and VML had earlier worked together in 2023 for creating a giant meatball using DNA from a woolly mammoth combined with sheep cells.
Che Connon, CEO of Lab-Grown Leather Ltd., said the T. rex connection adds a distinctive edge to the product. “It's not just about a green alternative to leather, it's a technological upgrade,” he said.
"By positioning T-Rex leather as ultra-luxury, we’re showing that ethical, lab-grown materials can be just as desirable – if not more so – than traditional leather," Bas Korsten, global chief creative officer at VML said in a statement to USA TODAY.
However, the claims have drawn scepticism from parts of the scientific community.
Melanie During, a Dutch vertebrate paleontologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, pointed out that collagen found in dinosaur bones survives only in fragmented traces—insufficient to recreate something as complex as skin or leather.
Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, echoed this view. He noted that any collagen identified in T. rex fossils originates from within bones rather than skin, and that even a precise protein match would lack the structural organisation needed to replicate the properties of real leather.
Responding to the criticism, Mitchell said scrutiny is to be expected.
"I would say that when you do something new for the first time, there is always criticism."
He further added, "And I think we're really grateful for that criticism. It's the bedrock of scientific exploration ... I think this is the closest anyone has gotten and will probably ever get to create something that's T. rex."
Source: India Today