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Man Found Inside Stegosaur Statue Most Likely Died Trying to Retrieve Phone, Spanish Police Say

The dinosaur statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain, where a human body was recently discovered.
The dinosaur statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain, where a human body was recently discovered.
Screenshot: El Mundo/YouTube (Fair Use)

Catalonia police investigating the appearance of a human corpse crammed into the leg of a papier-mâché statue of a dinosaur in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain, say the most likely explanation is that the deceased man somehow lost his phone in the dino and got stuck trying to retrieve it.

According to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the Spanish regional police force Mossos d’Esquadra told the paper, “A father and son noticed that there was something inside and raised the alarm. We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It’s an accidental death; there was no violence.”

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“This person got inside the statue’s leg and got trapped,” the spokesperson added. “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.”

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Authorities said there was no evidence of foul play and the deceased had been reported missing by his family just hours before his body was discovered by a father and son who observed a corpse through a crack in the stegosaurus’s leg, the BBC reported. Firefighters were forced to cut through the leg of the statue to extract the remains. The police spokesperson told the Guardian that they are still “waiting for the autopsy reports” but indications were the body had been trapped “for a couple of days.”

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Just how the man lost his phone inside in the first place or entered the dinosaur at all, isn’t totally clear—the only obvious opening in the statue is two small holes where its mouth is located. However, a video of the scene uploaded to YouTube shows that a segment of the stegosaur’s belly appears to have been recently patched back together, suggesting the man crawled in via some kind of access panel that has since been sealed.

The statue has since been removed from the grounds of the cinema it was advertising, the BBC reported.