A handbag promoted as the 'world's first T. rex leather product' failed to find a buyer at auction on Thursday. The item, made from 'lab-grown T. rex leather,' was unveiled earlier this year at the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam alongside a massive dinosaur skeleton.
The Paris auction house Drouot said bids were well below expectations. 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.
Polish fashion label Enfin Leve designed the bag as part of its experimental clothing line. 'It has a character unlike anything we've handled. Dense, primal, operating on its own logic,' the label wrote on social media.
But what exactly is 'T. rex leather'? Dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago. About 20 years ago, researchers in Montana discovered parts of a T. rex skeleton, and paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer announced finding soft tissue remains, including protein fragments, inside the bones.
The Amsterdam handbag project relies on data from that discovery, according to Thomas Mitchell and Ernst Wolvetang of The Organoid Company, who helped develop the leather. They used AI to reconstruct a complete protein sequence, based largely on chicken proteins, as birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs.
Postdoctoral researcher Jan Dekker from the University of Turin doubts the bag contains any actual dinosaur material. 'Dinosaur proteins are very controversial,' he told DW. Even if the original fragments came from T. rex, about 90% of the resulting protein sequence would come from chicken. 'It's more chicken than anything else,' he said.
The company behind the project did not respond to requests for comment. In a press release, Bas Korsten of advertising agency VML said lab-grown leather had failed to convince the luxury market, so 'we knew we had to do something radically different.' The T. rex concept offered a natural marketing hook.
While Dekker wouldn't use the term 'T. rex leather' from a scientific perspective, he sees a potential upside: if the idea inspires people to take an interest in science, that is always a good thing.
Source: www.dw.com