Stench Alerts Father And Son To Missing Man's Corpse In Leg Of Dinosaur Statue

A father and son alerted local authorities near Barcelona on Saturday that, after noticing a fetid smell coming from a local dinosaur statue, they had made a grisly discovery. After tearing open a piece of the statue's leg, the father discovered a dead body wedged inside the hollow leg of the papier-mâché stegosaurus.

Police believe that the body belongs to an as-yet unnamed man who likely dropped his mobile phone into the statue, climbed in to retrieve it, and then became trapped, possibly after hitting his head, the BBC reports. The man's family reported the 39-year-old missing just hours before his body was discovered, but authorities don't believe foul play was involved in the death. 

“We found the body of a man inside the leg of this dinosaur statue. It’s an accidental death; there was no violence," a spokesperson for for regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra 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."

Video from the Twitter account of El Mirall.net shows firefighters sawing open the dinosaur's leg to retrieve the body. The statue has since been removed from the Cubic Building in the Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, where it had been displayed to promote an old cinema.  

Autopsy results are still pending to determine an exact cause of death, reports the Washington Post, but police believe the body may have been trapped inside the statue for at least a "couple of days."