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A missing 39-year-old man has been found dead inside a papier-mâché stegosaurus in Spain after a father and son noticed an odd smell emanating from the statue.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.The father and son who found the body were walking past the statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Barcelona, when they noticed the smell. The man looked closer and saw a corpse through a crack in the stegosaurus's leg, BBC News reports. Firefighters were called to the scene, where they cut open the leg to retrieve the body from inside.
Police confirmed that the body belonged to an unnamed man, who had been reported to the authorities missing a few hours previous.
Santa Coloma Police confirmed to local newspaper El Periodico that the body was found face down inside the dinosaur's leg. His family had reported him missing shortly before he was found, though they hadn't heard from him in two days and believed he was sleeping rough. It's possible that the man accessed the inside of the dinosaur through a panel on its underbelly, which the paper says is known to be used by homeless people in the past. Local police also posit he could have been trying to reach a phone that had been dropped.
The death is going to autopsy, but is not being treated as suspicious.
“We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It is an accidental death; there was no violence," a spokesperson for the local police told the Guardian. "This person got inside the statue’s leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he’d dropped. It looks like he entered the statue head first and couldn’t get out."
It's unknown how long the man was in there before he was discovered. The prop was initially placed in the town to advertise a local cinema and has now been removed.
