Daintree

Protected since 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988 as part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland, Daintree is reckoned by many scientists the oldest continuous rainforest on the planet, with plant lineages going back more than 180 million years, to when Australia was still part of the supercontinent Gondwana. Its plants include some of the most primitive living angiosperms — flowering plants — known to science, genuine living fossils that let botanists study the early stages of plant evolution directly. It is also one of the last significant refuges of the southern cassowary, a giant and potentially dangerous flightless bird reckoned key to dispersing the seeds of dozens of tree species whose fruit only its large bill can swallow whole.