Older Than the Amazon

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Age is an unusual thing to claim about a forest, since living trees are replaced constantly, but the Daintree claim rests on something more durable than any individual tree: an unbroken lineage of rainforest cover on the same ground, reaching back roughly 180 million years on the evidence of fossils and pollen. That makes it, by the figure most commonly repeated, the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforest anywhere on Earth, older than the Amazon itself. The forest today covers only about 1,200 square kilometers of far north Queensland, running from the Daintree River north toward Cooktown and inland to the Great Dividing Range, a small area that nonetheless holds a share of Australia's biodiversity wildly out of proportion to its size, including roughly 30 percent of the country's frog, reptile and marsupial species packed into land that makes up little more than a tenth of one percent of the continent.