New Dinosaur Exhibit Stinks
A museum in London has unveiled a new dinosaur exhibit that smells, reports CBS News Correspondent Sam Litzinger – but it could have been worse.
The Museum of National History has put up a 3/4-scale robotic roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex, complete with lashing tail. And it smells.
Museum officials initially wanted to capture the scent of a T-Rex drenched in the blood of its victims, reeking of rotten meat.
“We investigated a number of smells at first, but the reality of the smell of dead, rotting flesh was so off putting, we figured we should go with the smell of the T-rex's environment instead of its breath,” said Audrey O'Connell, head of international business at the museum.
The result, called Maastrichtian Miasma, is a boggy, acrid, earthy scent.
Dale Air Deodorising Ltd. of Lytham in northern England, which created the scent for the museum, specializes in aromas for museums, zoos and businesses.
Frank Knight, owner of the company, said he has created fragrances smelling of jaguar urine, cesspit, boiler room, brewery, wild stag, machine oil, garbage, Thai curry, smoked fish and ozone.
“It took us about a month to do the dinosaur smell,” Knight said at The Natural History Museum's unveiling of the T-rex Tuesday morning.
The scent will waft around the 23-foot long, 13.5-feet high model, made at a cost of $330,000 by the Kokoro Co. of Japan.
So what will visitors miss by not getting a whiff of the dinosaur?
“The T-rex would have to be the most putrid, foulest thing that ever lived. A hyena times 10 would not even get you close,” said Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.
“The bigger you are, the stinkier you are, the nastier you are, the less other animals will mess with you.”
T-rex lived about 65 to 68 million years ago in what is now western North America and southern Canada, Horner said.
It could run up to 25 mph, and tore into its prey with 50 six-inch serrated teeth. Dinner included duckbilled dinosaurs, triceratops and other plant-eating creatures, and T-rex's digestive system had no problem with chunks of bone and horn.
Paleontologists believe a T-rex was likely to have a few pus-filled wounds to add to its bouquet.
“Some reptiles smelled pretty bad. They were prone to picking up things like botulism and e-coli,” said Harley Armstrong, a Colorado-based paleontologist at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
“Meat eaters, depending on whether they were scavengers or predators, could have chunks of rotted meat caught in their teeth. Some of the meat they ate could have been weeks old to start off with. Either way, I would not want to talk to him face to face in the morning,” Armstrong said.
Eau de T-rex looks to be a trendseter. Knight said another British museum contacted him for dinosaur smells.
“They want three different scents -- dead dinosaur, dinosaur breath,” Knight said, “and the third is, well, let's just call it dinosaur poo.”
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