A few weeks ago, Adam Ferguson entered an enormous walk-in freezer—one-and-half times the size of his bedroom—at the Field Museum in Chicago, where he works as the collections manager for mammals. A crowd of animal carcasses never smells great—under the best conditions, it “smells like skunk and freezer-burned meat,” he says. But in an adjacent part of the lab, where the team stores big bins holding bones waiting for preparators, he got a whiff of something unusually funky. The space reeked of “rancid fat and water with a little bit…
