Project Says It's Recreating Dinosaur Skin to Make T-Rex Leather, But Is It Really?
Traditional animal skin leathers? Those are dinosaurs. Enter "leather" made from the lab-grown skin of a T-Rex, which a group of companies and bioresearchers say they'll use to fashion luxury, "cruelty-free" purses. The project — led by genomic engineering outfit The Organoid Company, biotechnology group Lab-Grown Leather, and creative agency VML — will purportedly use the fossilized collagen of a Tyrannosaurus rex as a "blueprint" to engineer cells with synthetic DNA, according to a release. "We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex," Che Connon of Lab-Grown Leather, a professor of tissue engineering […]
A group of companies and bioresearchers say they'll use "leather" made from the lab-grown skin of a T-Rex to fashion luxury, "cruelty-free" purses.
The project — led by genomic engineering outfit The Organoid Company, biotechnology group Lab-Grown Leather, and creative agency VML — will purportedly use the fossilized collagen of a Tyrannosaurus rex as a "blueprint" to engineer cells with synthetic DNA, according to a press release.
"We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex," said Che Connon of Lab-Grown Leather, a professor of tissue engineering at Newcastle University in the UK, in a statement.
But is it really the skin of a Tyrannosaurus rex? Experts are skeptical.
"I doubt that our knowledge of dinosaur evolution is good enough to be able to design a collagen gene specifically from T. rex," Tom Ellis, professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, told NBC News, calling the idea of producing leather from the extinct predator "very far-fetched."
Others were harsher in their assessment.
"What this company is doing seems to be fantasy," Thomas Holtz Jr, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told Live Science. "We have NO preserved tyrannosaurid DNA (indeed, not Mesozoic dinosaur DNA sequences), so there are no T. rex genes."
DNA or no DNA, we also don't have a good idea of what T-Rex skin was like.
"There are a handful of [tyrannosaurid skin] impressions, but that doesn't let us know what the internal tissue was like," Holtz told Live Science. (There are examples of surviving dinosaur skin from other species, however.)
And then there's the fact that the project hinges on collagen. Collagen is an extremely common structural protein found all across the animal kingdom. It forms the foundation of your skin, bones, muscles, and ligaments. Even if the project could create "T-rex" leather, it's unlikely that the collagen it's made of will be much different from what you'd find in a cow.
In other words, there won't be anything uniquely "T-Rex" about the "T-Rex" garments and accessories.
"It gives them something that is at least unique and can justify a much higher price," Ellis told NBC.
We've heard flashy claims like these with other efforts focused on bringing back some aspect of long-dead creatures. Earlier this year, the "de-extinction" startup Colossal showed off gene-edited mice with the fur of a woolly mammoth — a stepping stone towards one day resurrecting the hulking creatures, it promised.
However, the mice didn't actually possess mammoth fur genes, as critics pointed out, but were edited to mimic them. Such was also the case with Colossal's supposedly resurrected "dire wolves," which are, in reality, modern gray wolves made to look like dire wolves.
In short, creative agency VML's promise to bring a dinosaur leather handbag to market is likely little more than a marketing gimmick for consumers interested in cruelty-free animal products.
More on dinosaurs: You Will Never in a Million Years Be Able to Guess What A "Dinosaur Erection Specialist" Actually Does For Work
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