Shark Bay

Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991 — meeting all four natural criteria of the convention, which only a handful of sites in the world manage — Shark Bay holds in the hypersaline lagoon of Hamelin Pool the most extensive and diverse colony of living stromatolites on the planet: rocky structures built by colonies of cyanobacteria that are practically identical to the first organisms to produce oxygen on Earth over 3.5 billion years ago, offering a living window onto the origins of life. It is also home to the largest dugong population in the world, a grazing marine mammal related to the manatee, and to a population of bottlenose dolphins studied continuously since the 1980s in the longest-running wild dolphin research project in the world, centred on Monkey Mia.