This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On Australia's northeast coast, in a strip of forest covering around 1,200 square kilometers, grow plant lineages old enough to have watched flowering plants themselves become common. The Daintree Rainforest, part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland, is estimated to be as old as 180 million years, which by that measure makes it the oldest continuously surviving tropical rainforest on Earth.
Age alone would be a curiosity; what makes the Daintree scientifically significant is what that age preserved. Continuous forest cover across such an immense span of time let ancient plant lineages survive here that vanished from most of the rest of the world. The Wet Tropics holds sixteen of the twenty eight primitive, or near basal, flowering plant families recognized anywhere in the world, close relatives of the earliest flowering plants, together made up of forty six genera and one hundred seventy five species, so walking through the Daintree is, in a real botanical sense, closer to walking through a much older version of Earth's vegetation than almost anywhere else still standing. The forest holds an outsized share of Australia's plant diversity for its size, concentrated in a landscape shaped as much by the Wet Tropics' own mountainous terrain and heavy rainfall as by its age.
Before this entry, this atlas's only ecosystem representing Australia was the Great Barrier Reef, a marine biome entry; the Daintree is the first terrestrial Australian ecosystem on the atlas, and it belongs to the Tropical Rainforest biome alongside the Amazon and Congo Basin rainforests already recorded here, three of the planet's major tropical forest systems now standing side by side on the same shelf.