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People who like bad-smelling flowers were in luck this week. They could see and smell the corpse flower – the world's smelliest plant. It gets its name from a corpse – a dead body. The flower attracted thousands of visitors to a botanic garden near Melbourne, Australia. The plant bloomed on Monday. Thousands of people waited to see it. Some people held their nose when they were near the flower. Others coughed and held their breath because of the bad smell. An Australian news channel said visitors described the smell as being like a dead mouse or rotting garbage.
The corpse flower is extremely rare. A conservation group listed it as an endangered species. There are only a few hundred of the plants left in the wild, in Indonesia. A lot of the forest where the plant grows has been cut down to grow palm oil. The flower is one of the biggest in the world. It can grow to three metres high and live over 40 years. However, it flowers just once a decade and opens only for a day or two. The smell of the corpse flower attracts beetles and flies. The insects pollinate the flower so it can bloom again.
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