About 66 million years ago, the Tyrannosaurus rex roamed around Earth terrifying nature around it.
Now, one of the largest predators ever to live on land can be your next purse.
Researchers and bioengineers are working to create the next cruelty-free and sustainable luxury handbag using lab-grown leather from fossilized T. rex remains from the prehistoric creature.
That’s right -— in the year 2025, dinosaurs are Jurass-chic.
“We’re unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex,” Che Connon, professor of tissue engineering at Newcastle University, said in a statement.
The first-of-its-kind approach to luxury fashion uses T. rex DNA as a groundbreaking high-quality alternative to traditional leather.
If successful, this would be the first-ever sample of a leather that’s sourced from an extinct species — though some experts don’t think it’s possible.
The partnership between creative agency VML, genomic engineering leader The Organoid Company and sustainable biotechnology pioneer Lab-Grown Leather Ltd. would portray how ancient biology can create a next-generation material that will ultimately influence the future of luxury goods.
The lab-grown fossilized T. rex collagen will be used as a blueprint to manufacture a material that’s structurally identical to traditional leather. It will also be biodegradable and “innovative and ethically sound.”
Unlike naysayers, Connon said it will soon become a reality.
“The hard bit is making leather from cells, and we’ve done that,” Connon told The Post. “The upstream bit is using existing technologies, which is why we’re confident we can do this so quickly.”
The initial implementation of T. rex leather will focus on accessories with a goal to produce a flagship commercial luxury fashion item by the end of the year.
Eventually, once production gets larger, this could open the door to possibilities beyond the fashion industry, such as the automotive sector.
“With T-Rex leather we’re harnessing the biology of the past to create the luxury materials of the future,” Bas Korsten, Global Chief Creative Officer, Innovation & CCO EMEA at VML, said in a statement.
“Part of it is the fact that it’s demonstrating that you can start to create new materials that have never been formed before,” Connon said. “So the same process could be used to create much stronger, for example, or change color or a whole host of things that are feasible but have never been seen before.”
In order to create it, synthetic DNA will be used to engineer cells that will then be integrated into an Elemental-X product stream, utilizing a scaffold-free approach that allows the cells to merge in their own natural structure.
Connon explained that he and his team spent 15 years in university doing tissue engineering, then three to four years at the company to get to the point of making the skin and the leather.
“This project is a remarkable example of how we can harness cutting-edge genome and protein engineering to create entirely new materials,” Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company, commented.
“By reconstructing and optimizing ancient protein sequences, we can design T. Rex leather, a biomaterial inspired by prehistoric biology, and clone it into a custom-engineered cell line.”
According to VML, the T. rex leather is a cell-grown performance material that is more than just imitation and provides the natural durability, repairability and tactility that’s already expected in high-end luxury leather goods.
However, not all scientists are digging the revelations. One dinosaur expert told Live Science he thinks the claim of making T. rex leather is “misleading” and “what this company is doing seems to be fantasy.”
“We have NO preserved tyrannosaurid DNA (indeed, not Mesozoic dinosaur DNA sequences), so there are no T. rex genes,” Thomas Holtz, Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told the outlet.
DNA starts to decay as soon as an animal dies, though some fragments might remain in the environment for a few million years. The oldest preserved DNA on record is about 2 million years old, and the T. rex went extinct 66 million years ago.
Holtz added that paleontologists have only found T. rex collagen in bone, not skin, which is the basis for leather, and that researchers don’t have access to good tyrannosaurid skin samples since it’s rarely preserved in fossils.
Some experts are less skeptical, noting that while it may be possible, any chance of getting results soon isn’t likely, and when they do, it’ll be expensive.
The “gimmick” is at a “very early stage,” Tom Ellis, professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, told NBC. “I doubt that our knowledge of dinosaur evolution is good enough to be able to design a collagen gene specifically from T. rex.”
Ellis added that producing real T. rex leather is “very far-fetched,” and the properties of any collagen results are likely to be similar to those of a cow or chicken, which means that it would look and feel the same as any other alternative leather.
Though the T. rex collagen “gives them something that is at least unique and can justify a much higher price,” he said.
But Connon rebuked the notion that it’s not possible, telling The Post that “some people have got the wrong end of the stick saying, well, you can’t do it. That’s not true.”
“Some of that seems to be around, there is no T-Rex skin, but leather isn’t skin. It’s a component of skin,” he explained. “So that’s a bit of confusion there. The technologies there are incredible, but they are very much there. And I think the challenge is, there’s a lot to bring people up to speed with.”
As he explained, the collagen fragments extracted are available from blood vessels or micro-vessels in bone, and the blood vessels have the same biological makeup as skin. “It’s the structural part of the skin, which forms leather.”
“People aren’t aware of all the different technologies or aware that they exist, so putting them together is quite a bit of a mental leap for people,” Connon said. “But rest assured, these are all things that have been proven.”
The researchers also stressed the environmental and ethical consequences of the lab-grown leather as well. Since traditional leather production is a component of extensive deforestation and the tanning process often uses harmful chemicals, this new approach can not only reduce negative environmental impacts but also put an end to animal cruelty concerns.
“Dinosaurs evolved to survive in extreme environments—conditions our planet is once again beginning to face due to accelerated climate change,” the news release also explained.
