A huge haul of dinosaurs has been uncovered in Utah. It is, says the Salt Lake Tribune, a veritable ‘logjam’ of 148 million year old remains.

In three weeks of excavations, researchers from the Burpee Museum of Natural History have uncovered four long-necked sauropods, two carnivorous dinosaurs and a possible herbivorous Stegosaurus in a quarry in the southeast of the state (press release).

National Geographic says the discovery “sheds new light on a Jurassic landscape dominated by dinosaur giants”. Scott Foss, a palaeontologist at the Salt Lake City office of the US Bureau of Land Management says the quarry is part of the Morrison formation, “where all the big sexy dinosaurs that we grew up learning about are most commonly found”.

In a Deseret News article Foss says, “We have not had a discovery of this magnitude in many, many years. They’re just scratching the surface. The potential is great.”

Although the site had long been known to hold dino remains the scale of the find seems to have surprised people (AP).

“Nobody anticipated the scale or the scope of what was there. Once they started excavating, they realized that the magnitude was far more than they had expected,” says Foss (National Geographic). “About two weeks ago they notified us that this was pretty big and we’d better come and take a look.”