A handbag is promoted as the "world's first T. rex leather product." But scientists are questioning its authenticity.
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.
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.
This article was originally written in German.
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