Bag made from ‘T. rex leather’ fails to sell at Paris auction
Bids for the one-of-a-kind piece fall well short of the US$500,000 estimate despite its prehistoric origins
A leather bag made from Tyrannosaurus rex cells failed to sell on Thursday, the Paris auction house Drouot said, commenting that bids were well below expected.
Auctioneers Giquello had touted the “one-of-a-kind” piece to sell for more than US$500,000 but bids barely broke the US$150,000 mark, said the Drouot house where the sale took place.
Unveiled in the spring in Amsterdam, the bag was created from traces of collagen from the femur of a T. rex found in the US state of Montana 25 years ago.
“In recent years, we’ve developed techniques – biotechnologies that allow us to instruct a cell culture to produce, so to speak, genuine T. rex skin in the laboratory,” said Iacopo Briano, a palaeontology expert associated with the sale, before the auction.
He noted the material differs from vegan leather, which was mostly made from plastic.
“In this case, it’s derived from a cell culture, so it’s 100 per cent skin. And at the same time, it comes from an animal that went extinct 67 million years ago,” he said.