“What it smells like is a fish that went bad in the refrigerator,” said pathologist Judy Melinek, formerly of the San Francisco medical examiner’s office. She dropped by to sniff as a professional courtesy, as docs like to say. “A dead fish is a corpse, I suppose,” Melinek said. “But this is not the smell of a human corpse. It’s missing five essential esters.” [...] She also said the flower smells like sweaty socks, although she acknowledged she has not smelled 3,000 of those and is less of an expert.

— A pathologist investigates the odor of a titan arum, aka corpse flower. Read more at Corpse flower definitely smells like a dead body, but not a human one, expert says at the San Francisco Chronicle.