Lab-grown Tyrannosaurus leather: More chicken than dinosaur?

In early April, the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam unveiled a handbag alongside a massive dinosaur skeleton — one made of "lab-grown T. rex leather."

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. The company plans to auction the handbag on June 11 in Paris.

But what exactly do they mean by "T. rex leather"?

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.

Debate over dinosaur proteins

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 study of proteins from archaeological and fossil 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.

More chicken than dinosaur?

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 chickens," Dekker said. "A very interesting development in itself, but it is not a dinosaur. In fact, it's more chicken than anything else."

The luxury appeal of leather

The company behind the project did not respond to DW' requests for comment, but in their press release, the handbag's producers explained that lab-grown leather had so far failed to convince the luxury market. "We knew we had to do something radically different," Bas Korsten of advertising agency VML, which also worked on the project, said in the statement. The T. rex concept offered a natural marketing hook — as dinosaurs hold a constant fascination for people all around the world.

Dekker shares that fascination, though his interest lies in research rather than branding. He uses biomolecular analysis to better understand the distant past. The world during the age of dinosaurs was completely different in terms of biodiversity, and the scientist hopes to learn more about that "completely alien and yet strangely familiar world."

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.

This article was originally written in German.