Companies are looking to create luxury items from a material that takes inspiration from the skin of a T-Rex. The bag in this image is made from crocodile skin. (Image credit: Photo collage by Marilyn Perkins; images by cumhurkaplan and SimoneN via Getty Images)
A partnership of companies has announced plans to develop luxury fashion accessories made from T-Rex “skin”, but researchers say they will be fakes.
A statement released by creative agency VML, one of the three companies involved, said the T-Rex leather would be produced in a lab and would be an “eco-friendly” and “cruelty-free” alternative to traditional leather.
The partnership, which also includes biotech companies Lab-Grown Leather Ltd and The Organoid Company, plans to create a new material based on fossilized T. rex collagen, a common protein that provides structure to skin and other tissues. They then intend to manufacture the material by engineering cells using synthetic or engineered DNA.
But dinosaur experts told Live Science that real T. rex skin would require DNA from an extinct predator that doesn't exist. What's more, paleontologists have only found T. rex collagen in bone, not in skin, which is the basis for skin.
Thomas Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told Live Science that after reading the statement, he found the T. rex skin claim “misleading.” “What this company is doing seems like a fantasy,” Holtz wrote in an email.
Live Science reached out to VML for comment but did not receive a response.
DNA begins to break down immediately after an animal dies. Some fragments can survive in the environment for millions of years, but researchers have not found any DNA from the dinosaur era. The oldest surviving DNA on record was found in an ancient mastodon ecosystem in Greenland and dates back about 2 million years, while T. rex died out 66 million years ago along with all other non-avian dinosaurs.
“We have NO surviving T. rex DNA (in fact, we don't have any Mesozoic dinosaur DNA sequences either), so we don't have any T. rex genes,” Holtz said.
He also added that researchers do not have good samples of tyrannosaurid skin because soft tissues like skin are rarely preserved in fossils. Without good samples, researchers do not have enough knowledge about what T. rex skin was like.
“There are a few [tyrannosaurid skin] impressions, but they don't give us any clues about what the internal tissues looked like,” Holtz said.
Dinosaur Collagen
The future T. rex-style skin would be based on T. rex collagen, some of which is present in fossils. Scientists used to think that all of the animal’s organic components would be destroyed during the fossilization process. However, in recent years, they have discovered collagen in some dinosaur bones. The collagen is preserved through a complex chemical process, and not all of it survives. Researchers who spoke to Live Science but were not involved in creating the skin expressed skepticism about using T. rex collagen for the new material.
Thomas Carr, an associate professor of biology at Carthage College and director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology in Wisconsin, said understanding of Tyrannosaurus collagen is incomplete because the fossilized polypeptides — the amino acid chains that make up collagen — are highly fragmented.
“There really aren't that many samples to work with to accurately reconstruct a collagen molecule specific to T. rex,” Carr told Live Science. “Secondly, collagens are fairly general molecules for
Sourse: www.livescience.com
