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DINOSAUR

Dinosaur skeleton sells for over €1 million in France

A nearly complete dinosaur skeleton sold for more than one million euros at auction in the eastern French city of Lyon late Saturday, the Aguttes auction house said.

Dinosaur skeleton sells for over €1 million in France
Photo: AFP
The Allosaurus, a ferocious carnivore named Kan whose species went extinct some 135 million years ago, fetched €1.1 million ($1.2 million), Aguttes said.
   
Discovered in 2013 in the Jurassic Era Morrison Formation in the western United States, the specimen is more than 7.5 metres (25 feet) long and 2.5 metres tall.
   
The unnamed buyer is French and the skeleton will remain in France and go on public display, an Aguttes spokesman said, without revealing when or where the unveiling would take place.
 
   
The buyer, who made the purchase by telephone, “wants to keep the location a surprise”, the spokesman said.
   
The skeleton is three-quarters complete and shows Kan in a running position with its mouth open.
   
The auction house described the beast as “the archetype of the great predators of the Jurassic Era”.
  
The sale fell short of the 1.3 million euros fetched by a dinosaur skeleton in October 2010 at Sotheby's in Paris.

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DINOSAUR

Missing man found dead trapped inside dinosaur statue in Spain

A 40-year-old man died after becoming trapped inside a large statue of a dinosaur in a Barcelona suburb, Spanish police have said.

Missing man found dead trapped inside dinosaur statue in Spain
The dinosaur statue has previously sometimes been used by homeless people as a place to sleep. Photos: Lluis Gené/AFP

It is not clear why the man went inside the decorative stegosaurus located outside a disused cinema in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, but there is no suspicion of foul play, said a spokeswoman for the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra.

“Everything indicates it was an accidental death,” she told AFP.

Police were called to the scene on Saturday.

Flowers placed at the feet of the large statue of a dinosaur where the man died. Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP

Spanish media reported that a father and his son out playing in the area noticed a strange smell coming from the papier-mache figure and alerted the authorities.

Firefighters removed the man’s body, which was inside one of the legs of the dinosaur.

According to local media, police suspect the man — who had been reported missing by his family — had entered the statue to sleep there or to try to retrieve something, such as his mobile phone, and became stuck inside the structure.

The dinosaur statue has previously sometimes been used by homeless people as a place to sleep.

There is a removable slab in the dinosaur’s stomach which the man is believed to have used to climb inside.

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