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 sits within a larger protected region, the Wet Tropics of Queensland, a World Heritage Area of roughly 8,945 square kilometers that stretches along the Queensland coast for about 420 kilometers between Cooktown and Townsville. The Daintree itself, at around 1,200 square kilometers according to Guinness World Records, is the best known and most visited part of that larger area, but the World Heritage listing recognizes the whole region's combined record: an exceptional concentration of ancient plant lineages, a living record of the evolutionary history of Australia's flowering plants, and terrain diverse enough to hold everything from lowland rainforest to upland cloud forest within a relatively compact stretch of coastline.
What distinguishes the Daintree from equally old sounding claims elsewhere is the continuity behind the age estimate. As Australia split from Gondwana and drifted north and its climate dried, most of the continent's rainforest was gradually replaced by forests adapted to dry conditions. Along parts of the Queensland coast, regular rainfall and a humid tropical climate let pockets of rainforest survive as refugia through that drying and through the ice ages that followed, with land bridges helping some wildlife move between surviving patches, while comparable ancient forest elsewhere was repeatedly wiped out.
That continuity is also why the Wet Tropics carries such unusual botanical weight: it holds sixteen of the twenty eight recognized primitive, or near basal, flowering plant families found anywhere in the world, lineages that trace close to the base of the flowering plant family tree and that mostly vanished elsewhere while surviving here in the same climatic refugia that carried the broader rainforest through the ice ages. A forest this old, whose plant lineages have nowhere else to retreat to if this specific patch is lost, is not simply one more example of tropical rainforest, but a documented, dateable record of a much older world that cannot be recreated once it is gone.