Scientist Bottles Smell of Bones to Help Solve Cold Cases

GEMBLOUX: So, there’s this Belgian scientist named Clement Martin who’s doing something pretty cool. He’s teaming up with the federal police to create a scent that mimics the smell of dried human bones. This could really help sniffer dogs find remains that have been missing for ages.

Martin has already figured out how to isolate the smell of decomposing flesh, which is now used to train cadaver dogs in Belgium. But here’s the catch: once the soft tissue is gone, the scent from the bones gets way weaker. Martin explained that bones actually smell different depending on how old they are. A bone that’s three years old will have a different scent than one that’s ten or even twenty years old.

Plus, bones can soak up smells from their surroundings, like dirt or even pine trees. Kris Cardoen, who heads up the dog training for the police, mentioned that there was a gap in their training. Their dogs just couldn’t find dried bones in cold cases.

At a training center near Brussels, they showed how it works. Inspector Kristof Van Langenhove and his springer spaniel, Bones, demonstrated the training using Martin’s corpse scent. They hid some tissues between cinder blocks, and the dog barked when he caught the smell. Cardoen said that the scent of death is one of the key tools they use to train these dogs.

Training a cadaver dog takes about 1,000 hours, and Belgium only has four of them at any given time. Martin is working with different samples of dried bones, including those from an unidentified man found in a suitcase. He keeps them in a glass cylinder to capture the scent molecules for extraction.

He likened his work to a perfumer mixing different aromas to create a unique scent. It’s fascinating stuff, and it could make a real difference in solving cold cases.