For your entertainment, I offer this article from the website for the “Institute for Creation Research”. That’s those folks who don’t believe in what most of us here believe and prefer to think that: “Each of the major kinds of plants and animals was created functionally complete from the beginning and did not evolve from some other kind of organism.”
http://www.icr.org/article/7558/
The article postulates that this “fossil-sniffing pooch” is evidence that fossils aren’t millions of years old as we palaeontologists believe and provide further proof of creationist idealism. It isn’t my intent to start a religious argument (so please restrain yourselves). People can believe whatever they want as far I am concerned.
But the question that crossed my mind as I was reading it was this. Do any of you have any experience of taking your pooch with you when fossil-hunting and has your dog ever sniffed out anything you might not have otherwise found? I would be prepared to believe that a dog could be trained to sniff out almost anything with a chemical signature (sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, whatever) and that the ability doesn’t depend on there being residual organic tissue in the way the article suggests. I often note that split nodules which prove to contain a fossil have a distinct odour that empty nodules do not and I'm a smoker with probably rather disadvantaged olfactory abilities. I can't smell the difference from the outside, but I wonder if a dog might be able to?
I haven’t had a dog for years, but when I did and took her beachcombing, she would often find a Pleistocene bone before I did – but I think she was using her eyes rather than her sense of smell.