Handbag claimed to be made from Tyrannosaurus rex skin cells fails to sell at Paris auction as bids stall at €150,000
A handbag advertised as the world’s first made from lab-grown Tyrannosaurus rex leather failed to find a buyer at Drouot in Paris on Thursday, with the top bid of €150,000 falling well short of the €300,000 estimate.
The auction
An experimental handbag produced from collagen derived from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil went under the hammer at Hôtel Drouot on 11 June. Auction house Giquello set a starting price of €100,000 and had valued the piece at €300,000, but bidding never passed €150,000 (around $150,000). The lot was withdrawn unsold.
What is rare is expensive. But here, this is not rare, it is unique. This is in the top five most incredible objects I have seen in twenty-five years of experience.
The black, minimalist bag was designed by Polish label Enfin Leve and had been exhibited earlier in the year at Artis Zoo in Amsterdam alongside a dinosaur skeleton.
How a dinosaur bag was made
Scientists extracted collagen fragments from a T. rex femur unearthed in Montana roughly 25 years ago. Those protein remnants were used to instruct a cell culture to grow what palaeontologist Iacopo Briano called “real T. rex skin.”
In recent years we have managed to develop techniques, biotechnologies, with which we can give instructions to a cell culture to build, in quotation marks, real T. rex skin in the laboratory. It is cell culture, so it is 100 percent skin. At the same time, it comes from an animal that went extinct 67 million years ago.
The resulting material was turned into leather and fashioned into a handbag.
- T. rex femur containing collagen fragments is uncovered in Montana, USA.
- The finished handbag is exhibited at Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
- Auction at Hôtel Drouot in Paris fails to sell the bag; highest bid reaches €150,000.
Authenticity under scrutiny
Not all scientists are convinced. Regis Debruyn of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris noted that the collagen could have come from the dinosaur but might equally derive from other organic matter in the remains. “We will have no way to confirm it or refute it,” he said. US palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer, who originally identified soft-tissue remnants in the Montana fossil, also disputed the claim, pointing out that collagen is a generic molecule present in many animals.
A glimpse of lab-grown luxury
Beyond the auction spectacle, backers argue the technology points toward a future where luxury leather can be produced without slaughtering animals. The sale, even if unsuccessful, was framed as a proof of concept for synthetic materials that could eventually replace animal skins in high-end fashion.
