A tragic incident unfolded when a man lost his life inside a massive dinosaur statue in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona, in May 2021. The 39-year-old was found inside a papier-mâché stegosaurus after being trapped while attempting to retrieve his phone. The discovery was made by a father and son who noticed something unusual inside the statue and alerted the authorities.
Local police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, treated the man’s death as an accident rather than suspicious. According to a spokesperson, the man likely entered the statue headfirst to recover his phone and then got stuck inside. Firefighters were called to the scene to carefully dismantle the statue and extract the man from its leg.
It was estimated that the man had been inside the statue for a couple of days before being found. Reports indicated that his family had reported him missing only a few hours prior to the tragic discovery. Following the incident, the stegosaurus statue, initially meant as an advertisement for a nearby cinema, was removed from the area. Even though the cinema had closed, the statue had remained outside the Cubic building.
The community mourned the man’s death, with locals paying their respects at the site where the dinosaur statue once stood. This incident, though unfortunate, is not the first of its kind. In a separate case, a 26-year-old man had to be rescued by firefighters after getting trapped inside a sculpture in Canada. He slipped into an opening of the Talus Dome sculpture and required heavy-duty rescue equipment for his extraction.