Fossil Rock (Jebel Maleihah)

Crest the last dune and the outcrop stands pale against the red sand, its rock faces printed with the casts of shells. You are walking on a sea bed: everything under your boots formed underwater, back when Arabia lay beneath a vanished ocean.

Fossil Rock, Jebel Maleihah to locals, is the geological exclamation mark of Sharjah's Mleiha desert: a rocky peak whose marine fossils are dated to more than 80 million years ago, lifted from ocean floor into bone-dry air. A signed six-kilometre trail loops up and around it, an intermediate two-to-three-hour hike over dunes and rock with one short, steep scramble and no shade at any point, so dawn and late afternoon are the honest windows. The surrounding red sand belongs to the 4x4 crowd, and guided dune drives run from the Mleiha archaeological centre nearby, which also anchors the area's deep human history. The whole outcrop sits inside a protected area: the fossils are for finding and photographing, never for pockets. Once night falls, the deep desert dark turns the base of the rock into one of the better star camps within reach of Dubai and Sharjah.