[Protagoras]

What I'm trying to find out is if a person who has just died has a different smell than they did a short time before they died. If so, how long? A minute? hour? day?

[Devil_Anse]

We did ponder that question when Geragos and McAllister made a big deal of how the "cadaver dog didn't make a hit" when placed in Scott's boat.

Some of us thought, well, maybe she hadn't been dead long enough for a cadaver dog to smell her!

I am told that decomposition starts fairly quickly--and of course decomposition is what produces the gases that the cadaver dog is trained to detect. So I am thinking that at room temperature a dead body probably has begun emitting its distinctive smell within a few hours.

Velveeta knows a whole lot more about these biological matters than I do. Vel, at room temperature, how long do you think a person has to be dead b/f their body starts to smell (to a cadaver dog) like a cadaver?

[Velveeta]

About 24 hours (give or take...depends on factors such as environmental temp)

Normal body temp at 98.6
1st hour after death the temp drops about 3 degrees and then about 1 degree per hour up to "around" 24 hours.

Decompostion actually begins when the body begins to heat back up via decompostion gases and the process of liquification begins.