The dead body of a missing person has been found Inside a huge dinosaur in Barcelona.

The authorities found the corpse inside a leg of the ornamental stegosaurus in the municipality of Santa Coloma de Gramenet in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area on Saturday 22nd May.

A father and son who had gone to the area to play alerted the authorities, and the police and fire brigade subsequently arrived on the scene and opened up the statue to remove the cadaver.

The police officers and firefighters had to saw out a hole in the papier-mache statue and extract the corpse using a crane, given its weight.

The body corresponded to a 39-year-old man whose family had reported him missing just hours before his dead body was found.

Local sources report that there were no signs of criminality in the man’s death and that his body presented no signs of violence.

The man is believed to have died shortly before his body was found, as it had not yet started to decompose or putrefy.

The Mossos d’Esquadra, responsible for law enforcement in Catalonia, believes he fell into the statue while trying to retrieve his mobile phone, or another similar item, which had fallen inside.

The force has opened an investigation to clarify the cause of death, which it hopes will be ascertained with the post-mortem, and to find out how the man ended up inside the statue.