"distinctive odor" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is often used to describe the smell of something, usually with a slightly negative connotation. For example, "The distinctive odor of rotten eggs filled the kitchen."
The feints have a distinctive odor, which MacFadyen compared to a smelly sneaker.
Work crews give priority to debris piles emitting the distinctive odor of rotting bodies.
The department is studying whether dogs may also be effective in the search for biological weapons, although officials are less optimistic about the program's usefulness in this area, since many germ agents have no distinctive odor.
The three workers — a plumber and his son and a recycling plant worker — are believed to have succumbed to hydrogen sulfide, a colorless gas with a distinctive odor of rotten eggs.
The air in sections of some casinos — especially the older ones, where the ventilation systems are not exactly state of the art — is a swirl of cigarette smoke, leaving a distinctive odor on the clothes of anyone who happens to stroll through the place.
As for the animals featured in this year's holiday issue: The story of the infection-sniffing beagle began with a report from a nurse in the Netherlands, who mentioned that a patient's stool had the distinctive odor of C. difficile — a bacterium that is causing serious and growing public-health problems in many countries, including the United States.
Primates can recognize their offspring by distinctive odors.
These airborne products are invisible but often have distinctive odors.
That's about all the length of yarn Pearson unwinds, and the results fit snugly into the category of the Southern Gothic -- or, given Pearson's love of detailing highly distinctive odors, Southern Mephitic.
Ants with various Gp-9 combos may be flagged by a distinctive odor--when the scientists rubbed workers on the abdomen and thorax of a dominant-only queen, the workers were attacked too.
"The officer next to me leaned over and whispered, 'Gee, I don't think I've ever seen a geranium let alone smelled one!" Davis researched the world's stockpiles and came up with the top eight chemical weapons with distinctive odors.
