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Did you know that dogs can use their cold, wet (and cute!) noses to sense sources of heat and thermal radiation? That discovery, via a 2020 study from Sweden that challenged dogs to choose between a warm and cool object across a room, makes them only the second mammal known to possess that superpower. (The other is a vampire bat.)
And that’s not all dogs' noses can do. Read on for six reasons why dog noses are among nature’s most amazingly engineered instruments—instruments whose power humans are now trying to recreate:
1. Dogs' sense of smell is between 10,000 and 100,000 times as potent as humans’. This power comes in part from the up to 300 million olfactory receptors dogs carry around in their noses, compared to our mere 6 million. And the part of the canine brain that is dedicated to smells is 40 times larger than ours, proportionally speaking.
2. Dogs can smell continuously, even while they’re breathing in and out. In contrast, when a human smells a scent (sniffs a rose, for example) we inhale that odor and breathe in oxygen through the same passage. But if a dog smells the same flower, air “splits into two different flow paths, one for olfaction and one for respiration," Brent Craven, a Pennsylvania State University bioengineer who has modeled canine olfaction anatomy using high-resolution MRIs, told NOVA.
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