Daintree Rainforest

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.

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

The Daintree Rainforest never named itself; it inherited its name from the river running through it, and the river in turn was named after a man who almost certainly never set foot in the forest that would eventually carry his name at all. Richard Daintree was a nineteenth century geologist and photographer working across colonial Queensland, mapping mineral resources and documenting the landscape as he went, and the river that cuts through the far north Queensland rainforest was named in his honor during that survey work. The rainforest itself became formally protected only much later, folded into Daintree National Park and, from 1988, recognized as part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that finally gave the ancient forest the legal standing its age alone had never guaranteed.