Project Says It's Recreating Dinosaur Skin to Make T-Rex Leather, But Is It Really?

A group of companies and bioresearchers say they'll use "leather" made from the lab-grown skin of a T-Rex to fashion luxury, "cruelty-free" purses. The project — led by genomic engineering outfit The Organoid Company, biotechnology group Lab-Grown Leather, and creative agency VML — will purportedly use the fossilized collagen of a Tyrannosaurus rex as a "blueprint" to engineer cells with synthetic DNA, according to a press release. "We're unlocking the potential to engineer leather from prehistoric species, starting with the formidable T-Rex," said Che Connon of Lab-Grown Leather, a professor of tissue engineering at Newcastle University in the UK, in a statement. But is it really the skin of a Tyrannosaurus rex? Experts are skeptical. "I doubt that our knowledge of dinosaur evolution is good enough to be able to design a collagen gene specifically from T. rex," Tom Ellis, professor of synthetic genome engineering at Imperial College London, told NBC News, calling the idea of produ ... Read full article.