Overview
- The handbag was offered for sale at Hôtel Drouot in Paris on Thursday, June 11, with an estimated price of €300,000–500,000.
- Project teams at The Organoid Company, Lab‑Grown Leather Ltd. and VML say they used a collagen fragment from a 1988 Montana T. rex, phylogenetic and AI reconstruction plus chicken protein templates to insert a sequence into bio‑leather cells, grow skin‑like tissue and tan it into leather.
- Lead researcher Che Connon and collaborators defend the work as a technical achievement in making leather from cultured cells and describe the lab process in detail.
- Independent experts dispute the central claims, saying the fossil‑protein provenance is contested and that the final material is largely a synthetic, chicken‑informed reconstruction rather than direct dinosaur collagen.
- The item spotlights bigger issues for the field: how studies claim ancient protein survival, how reconstruction methods are framed to the public, and the likelihood of tighter scrutiny on provenance, ethics and regulation as biofabricated luxury goods enter markets.