The park is an anchor in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve, and adjacent to the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.

Tamarisk Grove hosts a campground and is close to Yaqui Well, a "historic watering spot...with magnificent desert ironwood trees and a busy wildlife population.

[citation needed] The park is approximately a two-hour drive northeast from San Diego, southeast from Riverside or Irvine, and south from Palm Springs.

These woodlands include such plants as smoke tree (Psorothamnus spinosus), velvet mesquite (Prosopis velutina), and catclaw (Acacia greggii).

[10] The park is home to elephant trees (Bursera microphylla), which are "fairly common in parts of Baja California but north of the border practically confined to the Anza-Borrego region.

[11] Superblooms, one of the biggest Anza-Borrego State Park attractions, are indispensable indicators of the increasingly severe implications of climate change, precipitation levels, and shifting seasonal starting and ending periods.

[16] As climate change increases there is potential for wetter years which bring about "super blooms," that boost tourism during the winter and early spring.

The park has an exceptional fossil record which includes preserved plants, a variety of invertebrate shells, animal tracks, and an array of bones and teeth.

This major topographic depression with the Salton Sink having elevations of 200 ft (61 m) below sea level, forms the northernmost end of an active rift valley and a geological continental plate boundary.

Over the past seven million years, a relatively complete geologic record of over 20,000 ft (6,100 m) of fossil-bearing sediment has been deposited within the park along the rift valley's western margin.

Paleontological remains are widespread and diverse, and are found scattered over hundreds of square miles of eroded badlands terrain extending south from the Santa Rosa Mountains into northern Baja California in Mexico.

Six million years ago, the ancestral Gulf of California filled the Salton Trough, extending northward past what would become the city of Palm Springs.

Through time, the sea gave way as an immense volume of sediment eroded during the formation of the Grand Canyon spilled into the Salton Trough.

Here, the deposits of ancient streams and rivers trapped the remains of wildlife that inhabited a vast brushland savannah laced with riparian woodlands.

Combined with a long and complete sedimentary depositional sequence, these diverse fossil assemblages are an unparalleled paleontologic resource of international importance.

Environmental changes associated with these geological time divisions are probably better tracked by fossils from the Anza-Borrego region than in any other North American continental platform stratum.

These changes herald the beginning of the Ice Ages, and the strata contain fossil clues to the origin and development of modern southwestern desert landscapes.

Since the late 19th century, numerous scientific studies and published papers have centered on the marine organisms that inhabited the ancient Gulf of California.

Fossil assemblages from the classic Imperial Formation include calcareous nanoplankton and dinoflagellates, foraminifera, corals, polychaetes, clams, gastropods, sea urchins, sand dollars, and crabs and shrimp.

As the sea became more shallow, estuarine and brackish marine conditions prevailed, typified by thick channel deposits of oyster and pecten shell coquina that now form the "Elephant Knees" along Fish Creek.

As North and South America connected about three million years ago, terrestrial faunal north-south migrations began on a continental scale called the Great American Interchange, and are present in Anza-Borrego's fossils.

These very rare fossils include a gomphothere (elephant-like mammal), rodent, felid and small camelid, and were collected from 10– to 12-million-year-old riverine and near-shore lake deposits.

[21] Common foods of their diets included the Agave deserti, jumping cholla cactus, jackrabbit, bighorn sheep, and Indian rice grasses.

The institute offers in-depth field programs, a fifth-grade environmental camp, citizen science research, and Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students.

The foundation's mission is to protect and preserve the natural landscapes, wildlife habitat, and cultural heritage of the park for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations.