In early April the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam displayed a handbag next to a large dinosaur skeleton and billed its material as “lab-grown T. rex leather.” The bag, created by Polish fashion label Enfin Leve as part of an experimental line, quickly drew attention — not for its design but for the claim about its origin. The label says the piece will be auctioned in Paris on June 11.
The idea of dinosaur-derived materials taps into a long-running public fascination with prehistoric life, revived in popular culture by films that imagined cloning extinct species. But cloning dinosaurs remains impossible: DNA degrades over time and cannot survive tens of millions of years intact.
The handbag project relies on a controversial scientific finding from about two decades ago. Paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer reported soft tissue and protein fragments inside a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen discovered in Montana, challenging the assumption that organic molecules cannot persist for many millions of years. Some scientists embraced the possibility of preserved ancient proteins; others argued the structures could be the result of bacterial activity or contamination. That debate continues.
According to a preprint by Thomas Mitchell and Ernst Wolvetang, founders of The Organoid Company, the team developing the material used the Montana protein fragments as the starting point for reconstruction. Mitchell described the process as assembling a puzzle from a few pieces and filling in the rest with computational methods. The central unresolved question, however, is whether the fragments really came from a T. rex.
Jan Dekker, a postdoctoral researcher in paleoproteomics at the University of Turin, is skeptical. He notes that credible protein survival in fossils has only recently been extended to exceptional cases around 20 million years old, whereas T. rex lived more than 66 million years ago. From a strict scientific standpoint, Dekker doubts any genuine dinosaur protein survives in the handbag material.
The technique used to make the leather explains why. Researchers fed the fragmentary data into artificial-intelligence models to infer complete protein sequences, then used those designs to produce synthetic collagen. Because birds are the closest living relatives of non-avian dinosaurs, the AI model and the reconstruction were heavily informed by chicken protein sequences. Dekker estimates that roughly 90% of the resulting protein sequence is derived from chicken-like templates rather than ancient dinosaur material.
In other words, the finished fabric is better described as lab-grown collagen informed by fossil fragments and modern bird proteins — impressive biotechnology, but not a recovered dinosaur hide. Dekker calls it an interesting development in synthetic collagen, but emphasizes it is “more chicken than anything else.” Whether or not the original trace fragments were truly dinosaurian, they served as inspiration for a design built largely from modern species data.
The project also had a clear marketing aim. Lab-grown leather has struggled to gain traction in the luxury market, and linking a novel biofabric to a T. rex provided a dramatic story to attract attention. Organizers and collaborators said they wanted a bold concept to break through skeptical markets and spark conversation. The company behind the project did not respond to requests for comment for the reporting.
For scientists like Dekker, the episode is two-sided. He rejects the label “T. rex leather” from a strictly scientific perspective, but acknowledges the potential upside: striking public projects can provoke curiosity and draw people into science. The handbag sits at the intersection of paleontology, biotech and fashion — a reminder that advances in synthetic biology can blur the line between historical claim and engineered reinterpretation.