Handbag marketed as 'world's first T. rex leather product' fails to sell at auction. Is it more chicken than dinosaur?
Earlier this year, the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam showcased a handbag next to a massive dinosaur skeleton β one crafted from "lab-grown T. rex leather."
The widely promoted item went up for auction on Thursday but failed to sell. The Paris auction house Drouot reported that bids came in far below expectations. Auctioneers Giquello had promoted the "one-of-a-kind" piece as likely to fetch over $500,000, yet bids barely exceeded the $150,000 mark, according to the auction house.
With no existing benchmark to rely on, Alexandre Giquello, whose auction house arranged the sale, told press agency AFP that they needed to "come up with a price" that would capture both the investment required to create the bag and its uniqueness.
An experimental creation
Polish fashion label Enfin Leve designed the bag as part of its collection of experimental apparel. But it was the material, not the design, that attracted the most attention. "It has a character unlike anything we've handled. Dense, primal, operating on its own logic," the label wrote on social media.
But what exactly is meant by "T. rex leather"?
Dinosaurs went extinct around 66 million years ago. In the 1990s, the film "Jurassic Park" ignited a global fascination with dinosaurs and fueled speculation about whether scientists might clone them. Researchers have consistently said no: DNA degrades over time.
Disagreement over dinosaur proteins
About 20 years ago, researchers in Montana uncovered parts of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The discovery drew even more attention when paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer announced that her team had found soft tissue remains, including protein fragments, inside the bones.
Until then, scientists had largely believed such organic material could not survive for millions of years.
Yet many researchers remained doubtful. Some argued that bacteria colonizing the bones may have produced the structures Schweitzer identified. The debate over exactly what her team found continues today.
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 specializes in paleoproteomics β the scientific study of proteins from ancient 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, went extinct more than three times that long ago. With that in mind, Dekker does not believe the handbag can contain any actual dinosaur material.
More chicken than dinosaur?
Lab-grown leather represents a relatively new field 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 β whether they actually came from a T. rex or not β as a starting point. They then employed artificial intelligence to reconstruct a complete protein sequence. Researchers based the framework largely on chicken proteins β 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.
"What they have done is create synthetic collagen using an AI model trained on a variety of different species, mainly chicken," Dekker said. "A very interesting development in itself, but it is not a dinosaur. In fact, it's more chicken than anything else."
The luxury appeal of leather
The company behind the project did not respond to DW's requests for comment, but in their press release, the handbag's producers explained that lab-grown leather had so far failed to win over the luxury market. "We knew we had to do something radically different," Bas Korsten of advertising agency VML, which also worked on the project, said in the statement. The T. rex concept offered a natural marketing hook β as dinosaurs hold a constant fascination for people all around the world.
Dekker shares that fascination, though his interest lies in research rather than branding. He uses biomolecular analysis to better understand the distant past. The world during the age of dinosaurs was completely different in terms of biodiversity, and the scientist hopes to learn more about that "completely strange and yet familiar world."
While the paleoproteomics expert would not use the term "T. rex leather" from a scientific perspective, he does see a potential upside: If the idea inspires people to take an interest in science, that, he said, is always a good thing.
This article was originally written in German. It was first published on May 19, 2026 and updated after the handbag was auctioned on June 12.