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Ever Smell T-Rex's Breath?

Posted by simoniker on from the sniff-sniff-boom dept.

Jim Hawkins writes "Well, in case you never have the chance of getting up close and personal with a T.Rex, Dale Air, a company who 'nose' its smells, has recreated Tyrannosaurus Rex's breath for London's Natural History Museum. Seems people made a stink about the rotting flesh smell that would exist on T-Rex's breath - guess someone forgot to tell him to brush his teeth."

27 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. and this is useful because? by bunburyist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Still waiting for that cure for cancer.

    1. Re:and this is useful because? by Lurker+McLurker · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, (to take a bit of a tangent) I read somewhere that it may one day be possible to detect cancer by smelling someone's breath with an electronic nose.

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    2. Re:and this is useful because? by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wasn't there a story about training dogs to do that?

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  2. T-Rex breath by birdwax2k · · Score: 5, Funny

    Supposedly it smells a lot like T-Rex ass.

  3. This is not news! by tehcyder · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's been there since 2001.

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    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    1. Re:This is not news! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually, I think it's been there since 200.000.000 BC. :p

  4. "news for nerds" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    "stuff that matters"

  5. Nothing new is it? by GrahamCox · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm sure this has been there for several years - in fact I saw it when I was in London and I've since emigrated! I heard that the smell they recreated was actually a lot tamer than the original would have done, since obviously they didn't want people keeling over or being sick - so the smell they have there is more like vaguely rotting cabbage than the stench of rancid meat. Certainly when I saw it it didn't smell all that bad.

  6. Obvious joke. by ideatrack · · Score: 5, Funny

    guess someone forgot to tell him to brush his teeth

    Well it is in England...

    And I'm English before anyone gets upset ;)

    1. Re:Obvious joke. by jjjefff · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm not sure the stereotype is "from nowhere." Take a look at what some Brits have to say on the subject:

      Until the NHS started up, and before the availability of fluoride in toothpaste (or water), our British teeth were spectacularly ugly. Look at any film footage of average Britons before about 1945, and weep. The standard of living of the contemporary American probably afforded them better dental care; and, I suspect, a certain cultural austerity would have meant that corrective procedures such as braces would be regarded by us Brits as extravagance and vanity.
      - Simon Gilman, London UK

      I think Simon Gilman has put it best. Having spent my first 20 years in America and 14 years since living in the UK, I find that the average Brit is satisfied with teeth that might be crooked, stained, even slightly rotten, if they aren't causing much discomfort to their owner. Average Americans have much higher standards of expectation in the state of their dental health -- regardless of whether they have to pay for dental treatment or not, they feel very strongly that good teeth are a wise investment in looks and health. Many visits to the dentist by average Brits happen only after something has gone horribly wrong with their teeth, whilst Americans take an actively preventative approach with semi-annual dental checkups and intervention before any problems become severe. As a result of the greater amount of attention that Americans pay to their teeth, they are far more likely to notice and comment on the state of other people's teeth.
      - Wendy James, London UK
      And this is just too funny not to include:

      I don't know about the States, but here in Mexico the common phrase to describle 'wonky' teeth is 'dientes ingles' (English teeth).
      - Iain Pearson, Mexico City Mexico

  7. Britain Smells? by upside · · Score: 3, Funny

    Look at the URL. Those wisecracks at CNN couldn't resist a jibe, could they?

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  8. The smell of newbie in the morning by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Funny
    "Say you've got help desk staff who are getting tense and frustrated -- they can press a button to get an aroma to help calm them down," Knight said.

    And what aroma would that be? Luser eaten by a t-rex?

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  9. Reptiles and poor dental hygiene by N+Monkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    "-Rex's breath - guess someone forgot to tell him to brush his teeth."

    I used to catch beared dragons when I was a kid. They didn't have bad breath (that I can remember) but if they bit you the bacteria on their teeth could be nasty.

  10. Just to answer the pressing question by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, they do have the fart smell. It's listed as "Flatulence #9668" in their catalog.

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  11. Opportunist Cleaners? by Mazem · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if small opportunist creatures cleaned the T-Rex, like Egyptian Plovers clean crocodile teeth and various fish eat the parasites on sharks.

  12. Considering it's diet ... by dledeaux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I recently saw a very interesting program on Discovery that hinted at T-Rex actually being a scavenger, not a hunter.

    They had several interesting theories to back this up. For example, T-Rex had a very bad center of gravity for one thing. This coupled with the fact that it's arms were so small meant that it would not pick itself back up if it fell. This meant that T-Rex probably didn't run because it didn't want to fall. It probably walked everywhere and in walking, the only food it would be able to catch would be already dead food.

    Other reasons that pointed out it's "scavengaristic" diet where things like it's olfactory senses. Porportionally it is the same size as a vulture.

    So, the theory that it ate already rotting flesh would greatly contribute to it's problems with halitosis!

    1. Re:Considering it's diet ... by bwy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is amazing that a species that can't pick itself up from a fall could survive past a single generation. But, I'm sure there are other species with this fault. It just sounds like a bad trait to have.

    2. Re:Considering it's diet ... by Moraelin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've read that theory too, and it's a bloody stupid idea on several counts.

      For starters it would mean that there were _no_ predators over a certain size. (They all look like they're made to walk, rather than run.) Now in and by itself, that would be unusual, but not necessarily impossible. There aren't any predators the size of an elephant nowadays.

      What it wouldn't exmplain though, is why did several of the herbivore evolve defenses. Why did the triceratops, for example, need those horns and a massive bone shield, if not for defense? Why did other species grow basically armour plates? What was the evolutionary advantage of that, in the absence of predators?

      Nature doesn't create useless stuff like that. If you want a reasonable approximation of the triceratops, take the boar. It can gore something in front with the tusks (whereas the triceratops had horns, but same idea). And while the boar doesn't have a bone shield, it rubs its shoulders to resin producing trees. The resulting hair and resin mixture is basically the same kind of material as your motherboard. It's a sort of armour. I.e., again, you have a smaller and faster equivalent of the triceratops.

      Why did it need to evolve that way? Well, for defense. The forward shield and tusks allow it to gore a wolf or two.

      The observation that "the T-Rex couldn't run, therefore it couldn't hunt" is also stupid because it only considers half the equation. Yes, the T-Rex couldn't run. Not just because of the small arms, but the bone sizes are all wrong for running. But here's the fun part: neither could its prey.

      You don't necessarily need to _run_ to be a predator. You just need to move (in whatever way) faster than your prey. Even if it's walking, or flying, or swimming, or rolling on wheels, or whatever else. What counts is whether you can catch a prey, not whether your kind of locomotion looks like what we'd call running.

      Basically the T-Rex only needed to walk faster than its intended prey. Bear in mind that we're talking a 40 ft beast. Assuming that a reasonable amount of its body mass was in leg muscles, it could likely pull up to 11 mph walking speed. As long as its big bulky victims (which again, couldn't run either) walked slower than that, the T-Rex could find a meal.

      To understand the tiny arms, you also have to understand the context of walking at that size. Body weight increases with the cube of the weight. Muscle strength increases only quadratically with their diameter. I.e., the bigger you grow, the more you have trouble moving fast.

      It's very likely that to maintain a quick stride, the T-Rex needed a _much_ higher percentage of its body mass to be concentrated in its leg muscles, than, say, a chicken would have. The body itself had to be as lightweight as possible, and the legs were massively muscular to move it. Any useless weight, such as the arms, was a _disadvantage_, so the evolutionary pressure was for them to grow smaller.

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    3. Re:Considering it's diet ... by gedhrel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You ask:

      What it wouldn't explain though, is why did several of the herbivore evolve defences. Why did the triceratops, for example, need those horns and a massive bone shield, if not for defence? Why did other species grow basically armour plates? What was the evolutionary advantage of that, in the absence of predators?

      I'm not a behavioural paleobiologist, but the absence of predators doesn't seem to mean that there's the absence of reasons to fight. Maybe randy triceratops would fight over territory or a mate? Maybe girl triceratops were just turned on by massive head plates. Defence against predators isn't the only evolutionary advantage they might offer.

    4. Re:Considering it's diet ... by Hittite+Creosote · · Score: 3, Informative
      Maybe randy triceratops would fight over territory or a mate?

      A recent article in Palaeontologica Electronica (vol 7, issue 1) suggests so. A brief summary in the New Scientist news article

  13. Calming down by Anonymous+Writer · · Score: 5, Funny

    The firm is testing an aroma dispenser which plugs into a computer and is controlled from the keyboard.

    "Say you've got help desk staff who are getting tense and frustrated -- they can press a button to get an aroma to help calm them down," Knight said.

    A case mod with a built-in bong would work much better.

  14. Accurate? Isn't that a stretch? by StateOfTheUnion · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:

    T-Rex breath turned out so accurate and so revolting, the curators instead opted for a milder swamp smell to evoke the creature's natural habitat.

    Revolting is beleivable, but accurate? Do we really know enough about T-Rex's to say that the synthetic breath that was created was accurate? What bacteria lived in the mouth? Did the saliva have antibodies to protect open wounds around the mouth from bacteria and infection? What was the pH of the saliva? These all affect breath . . .

    There are lots of unknowns that make me think that the journalist's use of the word accurate is more than a little presumptuous. . .

  15. Diabetes analysis is done now... by cholland · · Score: 3, Informative
    Researchers at Mississippi State University recently discovered a way to detect diabetes by using the breath of the subject. I'm sure that similar efforts are being directed at cancer.

    According to the article, it utilizes Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CRDS) to detect concentration levels of acetone in a person's breath gas.

  16. Considering T-Rex was a scavenger by earthforce_1 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't think I would be particularly interested.

    If you are really curious, leave a kilo of raw hamburger sitting on the kitchen counter for a couple of weeks, while you go on vacation. Your house will be filled with the lovely aroma of T-Rex breath upon your return.

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  17. Science grabs for public interest by cerebis · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I am all for scientists attracting public interest to their research but, does it strike anyone that some attempts appear to do more to trivialise the pursuit of knowledge than it does to promote its' worth?

    The degree of conjecture necessary to claim an odor represents the breath scent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex is enormous. To the point that, when all the approximations and educated guesses are accounted for, it is likely you're wrong.

    At least demonstrate the scientific process with subject matter that will stand up to modest scrutiny.

  18. ". . . forgot to tell him to brush his teeth." by Jack+William+Bell · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not exactly. His parents reminded him every morning, but with those short arms...

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  19. Re:My T-Rex by Mr.+Bad+Example · · Score: 4, Funny

    > He's such a vain beast.

    Obviously he's a Mesozoicsexual.