On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 08:34:29PM +1000, Syd Curtis wrote:
> Among literature in a physio's waiting room, I found a magazine ...
> "... The Daintree,
> after all, is the oldest living tropical rainforest on Earth (about 135
> million years old), representing the oldest surviving tract of subtropical
> lowland rainforest surviving on the Australian continent ... It's also
> home to 430 bird species
The 430 bird can't be rainforest species alone - maybe tropical NE
Queensland has this many species?
The second factoid is more extraordinary - the notion that a forest could
persist over geological timespans. 135 million years ago the Daintree
area was about the latitude Tasmania is now. The first flowering plant
appears in the fossil record only about 125 million years ago. The
neighbouring Great Barrier Reef is a phenomenon of the last million years
and what you see today appearred in the last 10-20000 years or so.
Andrew
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