Catalan police found themselves confronted with one of the most bizarre cases of accidental death in recent memory, following a report made by a father and son back in 2021.
The pair were enjoying a Saturday afternoon stroll when they passed a papier-mache stegosaurus statue positioned outside a building in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a suburb of Barcelona.
They quickly became aware of a foul odour emanating from the sculpture and moved in for a closer inspection, only to discover a body through a crack in the statue’s hollow leg.
The remains belonged to a 39-year-old man, recovered by the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, who retrieved the body from within the statue.
A spokesperson for the authorities explained the man appeared to have climbed into the dinosaur’s leg – entering headfirst – while attempting to retrieve a mobile phone he had dropped, before becoming trapped and unable to free himself, reports the Daily Star.
“It’s an accidental death; there was no violence,” she confirmed at the time.
“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 headfirst and couldn’t get out.”
The interior of the statue was so impossibly narrow that three fire brigade teams were summoned to the scene and were compelled to cut open the leg of the stegosaurus replica.
According to local reports at the time, the man had been reported missing by his family just hours before his body was found, though police believed he had likely been trapped for a couple of days, and were unable to establish exactly how he had become stuck upside down.
Multiple Spanish news outlets, including El PaÃs and La Vanguardia, covered the case at the time, highlighting that the incident attracted significant attention within the local area and received both regional and national media coverage due to its extraordinary circumstances.
The statue had been positioned outside the city’s Cubic Building, erected as ornamental signage promoting a former cinema. Santa Coloma de Gramenet’s city council announced the statue’s removal in official statements after the discovery.
