In October, people began sharing a video allegedly showing a man who died after sticking his head into a mechanical dinosaur’s mouth.

For example, on Oct. 21, a TikTok user posted a video (archived) with the caption, “28-year-old man dies after photo attempt with mechanical dinosaur — family seeks $1.5 million from attraction.”

The video appears to show a man positioning his head inside the mouth of a mechanical triceratops or similar dinosaur at an outdoor attraction space. He throws up a peace sign for a photo. Then, the creature’s jaws begin to close.

The clip blurs the man’s head as he gets trapped in the jaws, then displays an image purportedly of the same man smiling. Additional footage features people crying, a hospital room and police officers, as well as attorneys in a courtroom. A narrator’s voice says a judge ruled the attraction’s owners had to pay the man’s family $450,000 over his death.

Others shared the same rumor and video on Facebook (archived), Instagram, TikTok (archived) and X (archived). Snopes readers also searched our website for more information.

To learn more, we performed a reverse image search with Google Lens using a screenshot of the man putting his head into the mechanical dinosaur’s mouth, then selected the tool’s “exact matches” tab to view a list of post dates.

Among the hundreds of results, we located a longer video that users appeared to first share as early as mid-September featuring two camera angles of the man getting his head stuck in the mechanical creature’s mouth.

That earlier clip, possibly first shared by TikTok user @papino.2145 on Sept. 14, showed the same man freeing himself from the dinosaur’s mouth and escaping without any apparent major injuries. It did not include any of the additional footage other than the man and mechanical dinosaur. Others also shared the longer video.

User @papino.2145’s longer clip displayed a “Creator labeled as AI-generated” label. The visuals did not feature any obvious signs of AI, although the audio appeared to include a number of added sound effects.

In sum, the video did not show a man dying from getting his head trapped in a mechanical dinosaur’s mouth.

The original clip appeared genuine and did not contain any obvious visual signs of AI. We bore in mind that while @papino.2145’s post of the longer video did display an AI label, it may not have been the original post. As such, we have rated the claim miscaptioned because the video did not show a man dying, regardless of whether it was AI-generated.

We privately messaged @papino.2145 to ask if the user created the video, as well as if it truly featured any AI elements. We will update this story if we uncover any further evidence indicating the original clips showing the man freeing himself were genuine or fake.

Additional information

Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo did not locate any news media outlets reporting about the man pictured in the video. Instead, those results displayed a Lead Stories fact-check article also ruling the man did not die, as well as an apparently authentic video of a different man getting his head stuck in another mechanical dinosaur. According to that video, that man, if real, also apparently freed himself with no major injuries.

As for the still pictures of the supposed victim and all of the additional footage from the fabricated news story, reverse image searches helped to locate the truth about those materials.

The still photo of the man smiling originated from outlets’ reports of a man killed in a Texas shooting in 2023. Other videos featured a different man’s still picture, for example an X post misleadingly showing a photo of a British boy reportedly stabbed to death in 2025.

Searches indicated the footage of the woman crying came from a grandmother’s emotional outburst happening in a courtroom more than a decade earlier. The clip of a man covering his face in despair also concerned an older and unrelated video, that one featuring a man showing emotion after a judge exonerated him of a crime that had landed him behind bars for 39 years.

For further reading on the subject of dinosaurs, we previously investigated whether “Pride and Prejudice: Dino Time!” is a real “lost” film.

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