Back in April 2025, a team of bioengineers in the UK used collagen harvested from the fossilized remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex to create a lab-grown leather that they turned into a handbag. The plan was to then sell the world’s first T. rex leather purse at auction for somewhere in the neighborhood of €300,000 to €500,000 and prove there was a market for luxury goods made from creatures that have been extinct for 65 million years.
As Agence France-Presse reports, that market may not be as fierce as once thought, as the T. rex purse sold for significantly less than expected.
The bluish, blackish clutch, created by biotech firms The Organoid Company and Lab-Grown Leather Ltd in collaboration with fashion label Enfin Levé, racked up some bids and made some money, but after having just barely crossed the €150,000 mark, the haul was less than half of even the most conservative estimate.
Maybe a Cooler T. Rex Leather Handbag Would Sell for Half a Million
I guess nobody really wants a T. rex handbag, or, maybe more realistically, no one has tried to sell a T. Rex handbag before, and assuming people are going to pay €500,000 for one was a vast overestimation of its inherent cool factor.
The leather was made using collagen recovered from a T. rex femur discovered in Montana roughly 25 years ago. Scientists used computational biology and AI-assisted modeling to reconstruct missing genetic information and create cells capable of producing what they describe as genuine T. rex-derived leather in a laboratory. It’s like Jurassic Park, but if John Hammond were a hypebeast fashionista instead of Walt Disney with a God complex.
Its creators say the project was really more intended to showcase that there might one day be a viable alternative to traditional animal leather and cheaper, less luxurious-feeling plastic-based so-called “vegan leather.” And you know what? They might be right about that. Leather that feels like the real thing without having to kill an actual animal sounds like a real, thriving industry of the future. I just don’t know if starting off with T. rex leather was the best promotional tool to get the word out.
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