Visitors line up to see and smell a corpse flower's stinking bloom in San Francisco

Crowds have lined up in San Francisco to see and smell the rare blooming an endangered tropical flower that releases a pungent odor when it opens once every several years. The corpse flower began blooming Tuesday afternoon at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The flower blooms for one to three days once every seven to 10 years. During the bloom it releases a powerful smell described by some as rotting food or sweaty socks. It was the first bloom for the flower known as Mirage. The corpse flower is native to the Indonesia island of Sumatra,