The alleged organic odor of Hell Creek fossils

[Vladimír Socha]

Good day to all listmembers. I wanted to ask if there was ever any kind of investigation of the claims that the Hell Creek Fm. fossils exude a distinctly organic odor as Mary H. Schweitzer and some other scientists state. I was volunteering in the Hell Creek summer dig in Montana back in 2009, but can't seem to recall any such perception. Some say it's not the fossils that can "stink", but rather the whole matrix that it's in. Of course, this is an unfortunate debate, as creationists and some other people use it for their unscientific claims. Anyway, this interesting property of the Hell Creek Fm. sediments (if it's real) definitely should be investigated and explained. Thank you in advance, VS.

[Thomas Richard Holtz]

Certainly the clay layers in the Hell Creek often have thin coal beds and other organic rich material. Some of the leaf fossils there are such that one can grasp the stem and gently remove the leaf as a coherent unit from the slab.

But the creationists--and well-meaning but ill-informed science communicators--don't understand taphonomy, and labor under very outdated ideas. Most terrestrial fossils retain the original hard tissues and some of the firm-tissues (collagen, cellulose, chitin, etc.) of the organism. This idea that fossils are "turned to stone" and "lack all the original material" has been known to be incorrect for many decades now.

Yes, there are indeed cases where the original hard parts are entirely replaced with other minerals, but those are rare (and in particular, are rare for terrestrial fossils.) There is unaltered wood from the Eocene that still burns, for instance. 

Diagenetic changes to a particular fossil can vary within a formation; they can even vary from one part of the same site to another. These are ultimately controlled by issues like the particular amount of groundwater and what minerals were in it, among other things.

All that said, I suspect that much of the "smell" they are reporting is from the sediment and such: I haven't noticed in in specimens back in the lab that have been prepared. Nor have I noticed a different smell for the Hell Creek than for (for example) in the Paleocene Fort Union Formation or the Eocene Willwood Formation (or for that matter, the ?Aptian-Albian Arundel).

Take care,

On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 6:52 AM Vladimír Socha <vladimir....@gmail.com> wrote:

Good day to all listmembers. I wanted to ask if there was ever any kind of investigation of the claims that the Hell Creek Fm. fossils exude a distinctly organic odor as Mary H. Schweitzer and some other scientists state. I was volunteering in the Hell Creek summer dig in Montana back in 2009, but can't seem to recall any such perception. Some say it's not the fossils that can "stink", but rather the whole matrix that it's in. Of course, this is an unfortunate debate, as creationists and some other people use it for their unscientific claims. Anyway, this interesting property of the Hell Creek Fm. sediments (if it's real) definitely should be investigated and explained. Thank you in advance, VS.

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Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tho...@umd.edu         Phone: 301-405-4084
Principal Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology

Office: CHEM 1225B, 8051 Regents Dr., College Park MD 20742

Dept. of Geology, University of Maryland
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/

Phone: 301-405-6965
Fax: 301-314-9661              

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Office: Centreville 1216, 4243 Valley Dr., College Park MD 20742
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                        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
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