A partnership of companies has announced that it plans to make luxury fashion accessories out of Tyrannosaurus rex "leather" — but researchers say it won't be the real deal.
The T. rex leather will be produced in a lab and is intended to be an "eco-friendly" and "cruelty-free" alternative to traditional leather, according to a statement released by creative agency VML, one of the three companies involved.
The partnership, which also includes biotechnology companies Lab-Grown Leather Ltd and The Organoid Company, plans to base its new material on fossilized T. rex collagen, a common protein that provides structure to skin and other tissues. It will then make the material by engineering cells with synthetic, or artificially created, DNA.
However, dinosaur experts told Live Science that making real T. rex leather would require DNA from the extinct predator, and there isn't any. Furthermore, paleontologists have only found T. rex collagen in bone, not skin, and skin is the basis for leather.
Thomas Holtz, Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told Live Science that he thought the T. rex leather claim was "misleading" after reading the announcement. "What this company is doing seems to be fantasy," Holtz said in an email.
Live Science approached VML for comment, but it didn't provide one.
DNA begins to decay as soon as an animal dies. Some fragments might survive in the environment for up to a few million years, but researchers haven't found any DNA from the age of dinosaurs. The oldest preserved DNA on record — from an ancient Greenland ecosystem that included mastodons — is about 2 million years old, and T. rex went extinct with the rest of non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
"We have NO preserved tyrannosaurid DNA (indeed, not Mesozoic dinosaur DNA sequences), so there are no T. rex genes," Holtz said.
Hotz also noted that researchers don't have good tyrannosaurid skin samples, because soft tissues like skin are rarely preserved in fossils. Without good samples, researchers don't know that much about 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 said.
Dinosaur collagen
The upcoming T. rex-themed leather will be based on T. rex collagen, of which there is some in the fossil record. Scientists used to think that all organic components of an animal were destroyed during fossilization. However, in recent years, they've identified collagen in some dinosaur bones. The collagen is preserved through a complex chemical process, and not all of it survives. The researchers Live Science spoke to, who are not involved in the creation of the leather, were skeptical about the use of T. rex collagen for this new material.
Thomas Carr, an associate professor of biology at Carthage College and director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology in Wisconsin, said that researchers' understanding of T. rex collagen is incomplete because the fossilized polypeptides — the chains of amino acids that make up collagen — are highly fragmented.
"There really isn't much of a template to work from that could accurately reconstruct a collagen molecule that is specific to T. rex," Carr told Live Science. "Second, collagens are pretty generic molecules across all animals and so I'd be very surprised if there was a species-specific sequence that differentiated T. rex — or any dinosaur — from their closest living relatives."
The new lab-grown leather isn't just about extinct dinosaurs; it's also about making the luxury materials industry more sustainable and ethical, according to the statement. The partnership claims lab-grown leather can reduce the environmental impact that can accompany traditional leather production, including the deforestation associated with rearing cattle and the harmful use of chemicals in the leather tanning process. Animals also don't have to be killed as part of the process.
While Carr was "highly skeptical" about the T. rex leather claim, he said it is legitimate to explore lab-grown leather from an ethical perspective, and the partnership's research techniques were interesting. However, he thought it would be more straightforward to focus on living animals like cows and crocodiles, rather than dinosaurs.
"The notion of cruelty-free animal products is a legitimate ethical avenue to explore, so I don't think it needs any exotic 'prehistoric' twist," Carr said.
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