The park features a fenced area where visitors can join paleontologists and volunteers in searching for early Cretaceous fossils.

[3] Among the first scientists to explore the Muirkirk Deposit was Maryland state geologist Phillip Thomas Tyson.

He brought some of the strange bones discovered in the iron mines to a meeting of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 1859, where his colleagues identified them as dinosaurs.

[3] In December 1995, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission acquired 22 acres near Laurel, encompassing several Muirkirk Deposit exposure sites.

The park protects these sites from development and unrestricted collecting, and provides an outdoor laboratory where the public can work alongside professional and amateur paleontologists to help uncover the past.