Daintree Rainforest

The Daintree Rainforest in northeastern Australia is the oldest rainforest on Earth. It has been growing without a break for around 180 million years, since the time of the dinosaurs. It is also the only place in the world where two World Heritage natural wonders meet: the rainforest sweeps right down to the coast of the Great Barrier Reef.

• Areaapprox. 1,200 km²Tiny compared to Amazon but ancient
• CountryAustraliaIn the state of Queensland
• Ageapprox. 180 million yearsOldest tropical rainforest on Earth
• Famous animalCassowaryA huge flightless bird, sometimes called a "living dinosaur"
• Treesapprox. 3,000 plant speciesMany growing nowhere else
• Right next toThe Great Barrier ReefTwo World Heritage Sites meet on the beach

The Daintree compared to other rainforests

Area (million km²)

Amazon5.5

Congo2.0

Daintreeapprox. 0.001

The Daintree is tiny by area but unmatched in age. Some of its plant families have been living here, almost unchanged, since the dinosaurs walked among them.

What is the Daintree?

The Daintree Rainforest stretches along the northeastern coast of Queensland, Australia, between the Daintree River and Cooktown. It is part of the larger Wet Tropics of Queensland, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988. Most of the Daintree is national park, but the area is dotted with small towns, eco-lodges and Aboriginal communities.

An ancient forest

The Daintree is special because it has been a rainforest for an incredibly long time. The supercontinent of Gondwana (which once contained Australia, Antarctica, South America, Africa and India together) was covered in rainforest. When Gondwana broke up around 100 million years ago, Australia drifted north into the Pacific. Most of the continent slowly dried out, but a small strip on the northeast coast stayed warm and wet. That strip became the Daintree, and the forest has been here ever since.

The Daintree contains 12 of the 19 most primitive plant families on Earth, including direct descendants of the very first flowering plants. Walking through the Daintree is the closest a human can get to walking through a Cretaceous forest with dinosaurs.

Fact The idiot fruit (Idiospermum australiense), found only in the Daintree, is one of the oldest flowering plants in the world. It is so primitive that its seeds are highly toxic to almost everything, suggesting it evolved before the animals that should have spread its seeds existed.

The cassowary: a living dinosaur

The southern cassowary is the most striking animal in the Daintree. It is a huge flightless bird, up to 2 metres tall and weighing 60 kg. It has bright blue and red skin on its head and neck, a bony helmet on top, and dagger-like claws on its feet. Cassowaries are sometimes called "living dinosaurs" because they look like one and are closely related (all birds are descendants of dinosaurs).

Cassowaries are seed dispersers: they eat fruit and spread the seeds across the forest in their droppings. Around 70 species of Daintree plant depend almost entirely on cassowaries to spread their seeds. There are only around 4,000 cassowaries left in the wild and they are endangered.

Where rainforest meets reef

The Daintree is the only place in the world where two World Heritage natural sites sit right next to each other: the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. From parts of the rainforest you can see the reef just offshore. Rivers from the Daintree flow straight onto the reef, and the two systems are deeply connected. Damage to the rainforest (such as soil running off into rivers) affects the reef, and vice versa.

Did you know? The traditional owners of the Daintree are the Kuku Yalanji people, who have lived in the rainforest for at least 9,000 years. Their stories about the forest, its plants and its animals contain knowledge built up over hundreds of generations.

Deeper dive: Gondwanan relicts, the Wet Tropics and climate threats

The Daintree is one of a small handful of places (along with the Valdivian temperate rainforest in Chile, parts of New Caledonia and Tasmania, and the western coast of New Zealand) preserving plants and animals that are direct descendants of the ancient Gondwanan rainforest. These are called Gondwanan relicts. They include trees in the family Proteaceae (banksias and macadamias), the southern beech family (Nothofagus), and many tree-ferns and cycads. Studying these relicts gives scientists a window into the deep evolutionary past of flowering plants.

The Wet Tropics of Queensland, of which the Daintree is the most famous part, is one of the most biodiverse small regions on Earth. The area covers just 0.26% of Australia's land area but contains a third of its mammal species, 60% of its butterfly species, half its bird species, and over 700 species of vertebrate animals. Many are endemic (found nowhere else), including the musky rat-kangaroo, the tree kangaroos of the Atherton Tableland, the southern cassowary, and the spectacled flying fox.

Despite its ancient resilience, the Daintree is increasingly threatened by climate change. Higher temperatures, more frequent severe cyclones (Cyclone Yasi in 2011 was one of the strongest ever recorded in the region) and altered rainfall patterns all stress the forest. Sea-level rise threatens the lowland sections, and warmer ocean temperatures bleach the neighbouring Great Barrier Reef. Conservation work increasingly focuses on the integrated land-sea ecosystem rather than treating rainforest and reef as separate.

For more about Australia's landscape, see Australia. The biggest rainforest in the world is the Amazon.