Study 199: The Animal Is Not in It: A T. Rex Handbag Nobody Bought

On 11 June 2026 the first handbag described as T. rex leather was offered at the Hotel Drouot against a 300,000 to 500,000 euro estimate and failed to sell, with bidding stopping at 150,000. The material was grown from reconstructed Tyrannosaurus protein sequences rather than extracted from a fossil, so the object carries an origin claim with no physical chain to the thing it invokes. This study uses the sale to separate authentication, a claim about an object at a moment, from provenance, a claim about custody across time, and finds that the room performed the verification the object could no