Most flowers smell nice because they’re advertising sweet nectar to bees and butterflies. Carrion flowers play a completely different game. They evolved to smell like rotting flesh because their best pollinators are flies and beetles that lay eggs in dead animals.
These flowers usually look the part too. Many are reddish, brown or purple, often with fuzzy hair-like petals and sometimes a checkerboard pattern that mimics dead skin. Stapelia gigantea, the African carrion flower, can be 30 centimetres across and smells exactly like a dead rat.
A bizarre cousin called Hydnora africana grows almost entirely underground and pokes up a fleshy fang-toothed structure that looks like a screaming mouth. It even produces warmth and a meaty smell. Confused flies crawl inside, get trapped overnight to pick up pollen, then get released the next morning.
