Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are promising vibration control devices widely used for vibration mitigation applications as they combine reliability and stability of passive systems while maintaining versatility of active devices without large power requirements. These dampers are intrinsically nonlinear, so one of the challenging aspects of applying this technology is the development of accurate models to describe their behaviour for control design and evaluation purposes. This paper deals with the parametric identification of a small scale MR damper which is modelled using the viscous + Dahl model. Experimental results show reasonably good agreement with the forces predicted by the identified model.