Here's one that I hope will earn a lot of :blink: responses:
This April, I visited the Palm Beach Zoo in Florida, where I got to smell a binturong.
For those of you who don't know what a binturong is, it's a tree-dwelling mammal from southeast Asia (also known as a bear-cat), vaguely resembling a
shaggy, pointy-nosed, flat-footed, prehensile-tailed black cat, which, through some inexplicable (and downright unbelievable) quirk of biology, produces an odor
identical to that of buttered popcorn. The keepers brought the zoo's resident binturong out as part of a routine show featuring various animals, during which they asked for a volunteer to come up, pet the binturong, and then sniff their hand and tell the rest of the audience what it smelled like. My brother and I, who had heard what binturongs smell like (we watch Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel regularly) but were eager to verify it for ourselves, practically dislocated our own shoulders raising our hands.
Unfortunately for us, someone else was chosen, but the next day, I went back to the zoo and attended the show again, and
this time, I was selected to come up and smell the binturong (I suspect the keepers may have recognized me from before). When my family came to pick me up afterwards, all of them were eager to smell my hand.
As for my personal olfactory review, if I hadn't known that I had just been scratching the back of a giant arboreal fuzzball, I would have thought that I had been digging my hand into a bag of movie theater snacks. The critter really does smell
exactly like popcorn.
