Tyrannosaurus rex reconstruction By Nobu Tamura  CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72994785

Dear Readers, I am a bit of a one for perfume, although I am much more careful not to blast everybody with aroma these days – I well remember my Dad saying how, when he was a bus conductor, he dreaded going upstairs because of the fug of different scents from all the ladies on their way to work. I think we appreciate how much more chemically-sensitive a lot of people are now, and don’t want to cause coughing, spluttering, eye-watering or nausea. So, I am very careful about how much I apply, and try to make sure that it’s died down a bit before I venture out. Was it Coco Chanel who suggested that you spray some perfume into the air, and then walk through the mist for the optimal amount? Anyhow, one thing I have never, ever wondered was what a Tyrannosaurus Rex smelled like, but clearly I am behind the times, because there  is a developing science called archaeochemistry, which seeks to recreate the scents of yesterday.I suspect this all kicked off when museums became a bit more ‘immersive’. I remember visiting the Jorvik Museum in York, not long after it had opened. You jumped into a little train and were taken around a ‘Viking village’, complete with the smells of rotting fish on the harbour, or chamber pots in the streets. Lovely! But there is now a whole industry in creating the scents that scare people – one firm, Aromaprime, produces scents of everything from burning plastic to vomit. But to return to our T Rex theme, they also produce one called ‘Dinosaur Swamp‘, which apparently  ‘mimics that of the boggy, humid swamps and forests the T-rex may have lived in; within the vicinity of prey that fed off the plants and used the nearby water sources.’

And, in fact, this is the smell that’s used in dinosaur displays, rather than the actual smell of a T-Rex, which would probably be a mixture of rotting meat stuck between the animal’s teeth (presumably it couldn’t floss because of its teeny tiny arms), mud, blood and dung. Lovely.

One scent-maker described how he was asked to recreate the smell of a woolly mammoth, which the client wanted to smell ‘sweaty’. However, with a notable devotion to accuracy, the scent-maker discovered that mammoths didn’t sweat (and neither do elephants), so he went to visit a llama farm, and came up with the scent of ‘dirty wool and grassy poo’. Much better, I’m sure!

However, it’s not all trivial stuff. Aromaprime also develop ‘scent cubes’ to be used with dementia patients or the partially-sighted, containing the scents of everything from coal fires to toffee apples to a flower shop to a library. When I think about how evocative scent can be, I can well imagine how these might bring back memories and add a whole new dimension to teaching sessions too. We might not know how a T-Rex smells, but most of us can remember an apple pie, or the scent of candyfloss.