In general, my wife has a better sense of smell than I do; she works in the wine field, and has certainly never had any problems identifying and describing the various aromas and flavors of wines. But she has never been able to smell skunks. Whenever we drive by a roadkill skunk, etc. – nothing. We also are ferret owners, and I realized recently that it seems she can’t smell them, either. She can smell when their litter needs to be changed, but she can’t smell their musky scent.
So what’s up with this? She doesn’t have any other scent deficits of which I am aware. But the musk smell is a pretty basic, primal one, easily recognized, used by animals to mark territory and used by perfumiers to enhance the punch of perfumes, etc. Is there separate olfactory machinery for recognizing the musk smell (a la the vomeronasal organ that’s tied into pheremones) that could somehow be deficient in her?