Lab-grown Tyrannosaurus leather bag fails to sell at auction
The handbag promoted as the "world's first T. rex leather product" didn't find a buyer at auction. Is it more chicken than dinosaur?
Earlier this year, the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam unveiled a handbag alongside a massive dinosaur skeleton, one made of "lab-grown T. rex leather."
The highly publicized item was up for auction on Thursday. But it failed to sell. The Paris auction house Drouot noted that bids were well below expected. Auctioneers Giquello had touted the "one-of-a-kind" piece to sell for more than $500,000, but bids barely broke the $150,000 mark, according to the auction house.
With no precedent to go on, Alexandre Giquello, whose auction house organized the sale, told press agency AFP that they had to "come up with a price" that would reflect both the amount of investment required to create the bag and its rarity.
Polish fashion label Enfin Leve designed the bag as part of its line of experimental clothing. But it was the material, not the design, that drew the most attention. "It has a character unlike anything we've handled. Dense, primal, operating on its own logic," the label wrote on social media.
Dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago. In the 1990s, the film " Jurassic Park " sparked a global fascination with dinosaurs and fueled speculation about whether scientists could clone them. Researchers have consistently said no: The DNA breaks down over time.
About 20 years ago, researchers in Montana discovered parts of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The find drew even more attention after paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer announced that her team had identified soft tissue remains, including protein fragments, inside the bones.
Up until then, scientists had largely believed such organic material couldn't survive for millions of years.
Yet many researchers remained skeptical. Some argued that bacteria colonizing the bones may have created the structures Schweitzer identified. The debate over exactly what her team found continues today.
The Amsterdam handbag project relies on data from that Montana discovery, according to a preprint by Thomas Mitchell and Ernst Wolvetang, founders of The Organoid Company, which helped develop the lab-grown leather. "It's like having a puzzle, but you only have a few pieces, and then you have to fill in the rest," Mitchell said, describing the process in an Instagram video. The central question remains whether the available fragments actually came from a T. rex.
Postdoctoral researcher Jan Dekker from the University of Turin has his doubts. He's specialized in paleoproteomics, the scientific study of proteins from ancient remains.
"Dinosaur proteins are very controversial," Dekker told DW. "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." T. rex, however, died out more than three times that long ago. With that in mind, Dekker doesn't believe the handbag can contain any actual dinosaur material.
Lab-grown leather represents a relatively new area of biotechnology. Researchers aim to create a material with properties similar to traditional leather.
To produce the Amsterdam handbag material, scientists used the discovered protein fragments, be they actually from a T. rex or not, as their starting point. They then used artificial intelligence to reconstruct a complete protein sequence. Researchers based the framework largely on chicken proteins, since birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs.
Dekker finds the process intriguing. But even if the original fragments did come from T. rex, he says, roughly 90% of the resulting protein sequence would still come from chicken rather than dinosaur.
"What they have done is create synthetic collagen using an AI model trained on a variety of different species, mainly chicken," Dekker said. "A very interesting development in itself, but it is not a dinosaur. In fact, it's more chicken than anything else."
While the paleoproteomics expert wouldn't use the term "T. rex leather" from a scientific perspective, he does see a potential upside: If the idea inspires people to take an interest in science, that, he said, is always a good thing.
