King Fern Creek showcases the great natural beauty together with the significant examples from the Age of the Pteridophytes.
One of the most significant evolutionary events in the history of the world was the adaptation of plants to life on land.  The first land plants were the fungi and algae of the Ordovician Period, some 500 million years ago.  Spore-producing plants including clubmosses and ferns reached their greatest diversity in a period referred to as the Age of the Pteridophytes, beginning in the Silurian Period some four hundred and thirty five million years ago and extending through to the Devonian and Carboniferous Periods, which lasted until approximately 280 million years ago.

Within the rainforests of the Daintree, outstanding examples of primitive relict flora represent this period.  The most primitive plants found within Cooper Creek Wilderness include Huperzia (Tassel ferns – formerly Lycopodium), Selaginella, Lycopodiella, Psilotum (Ribbon ferns), Marattia and Angiopteris (King fern).

Cooper Creek Wilderness gives opportunity for visitors to experience the awe-inspiring beauty of Nature, while an expert guide is able to explain the significance of the vegetation and wildlife along the way.   The wealth of biodiversity, the intricacy of relationships, the continuity of the rainforest over extensive periods of time and the awe-inspiring beauty combine to humble us and to instil a feeling of reverence for this unique place.

The King Fern (Angiopteris evecta) has either leaves tufted near ground level, or an erect rhizome forming a massive, woody trunk up to 1 metre in diameter and 3 metres in height in older specimens.  The leaf stalks are green, smooth and swollen at the base where a pair of dark cockle-shell like containers enclose the base. The bi-pinnate fronds are massive, up to 8 metres in length, and are reputedly the largest fronds of any fern on earth.

Angiopteris is a primitive genus and represents an ancient flora of Gondwanan origin.  Fossilised Angiopteris-like ferns dating from the early Mesozoic, some 200 million years ago, have been found at Lune River in Tasmania, when Australia was still part of Gondwana and a warm, wet climate prevailed.  During the slow drift north, the species was confined to warm and wet refugia such as the Daintree Rainforest.

The King Fern is a member of the Family Marattiaceae  (order  Marattiales).  The  genus Angiopteris contains approximately 100 species occurring in Madagascar, south-east Asia, Japan, Australia and the south-west Pacific.  Angiopteris evecta is the only species in this genus that occurs in Australia.

A familiar fruit piercing moth caterpillar, well-known to Neil through his nocturnal forays over 17 years, relies on this food-plant.

We rarely see the moths during the day because they assume their diurnal camouflage, looking like dead leaves.  No sign of the beautiful orange-colours that they exhibit at night.  Fruit farmers regard the moths as pests because they pierce the fruit with their strong probisci, suck out the fruit juice and spoil the fruit.  Take a close look at the image above.  Two moths are feeding off the mangosteen, the queen of the tropical fruit.  Queen Victoria would not be amused!

In the Daintree, this exquisite vine drips out of the canopy, its flowers catching your eye as you walk through the rainforest.  Its aerial roots are obvious and it does not need to be pot-bound.

A cricket is seen here feeding on the plentiful nectar of Hoya potsii.  Long black pods appear on the vine after the flower has faded.  It is the content of these pods that amazed us.  More delicate than thistledown, the Hoya seeds catch on the wind and are dispersed through the forest.  It was many years before we were privileged to sight a Hoya bean bursting open releasing hundreds of miniature parachutes into the rainforest.

There may be a great many Australians that have never even heard of a cassowary, let alone their ancestry to the much more recognisable Emu.

A fossil found within the World Heritage Riversleigh Site depicts an intermediate species, dubbed the ‘Emuwary’, lost to antiquity in all respects other than this sole fossil record.  No doubt, with sufficient exploration, other intermediate species will be found in the ever-expanding fossil record, capturing the transition towards the Ostrich on the African portion of Gondwana; the Rhea on the South American portion and the Moa on the New Zealand portion.

Despite the phenomenal passage of time, the Gondwanan Cassowary continues to exist within that last remaining fragment of Gondwana Rainforest in North Queensland, Australia.

This image showcases not only the unity of a cassowary family, but one in pristine rainforest habitat.  What could be better for the ‘Home Page’ of a website dedicated to the celebration of such a unique habitat?

We don’t like to be nuisances, so we try to identify as much as we can from the web.  An excellent web site  www.findaspider.org.au has images of many spiders found in South-east Queensland and has helped us a great deal in the past.

This elegant specimen was not there.  Next step is to appeal to the author of this site, arachnologist Ron Atkinson, who has obligingly helped us to identify many species over the years.  Ron’s response goes into details about the possibilities:

No, this is not a spider I recognize.  Its leg arrangement is suggestive of a huntsman (Family Sparassidae) and some of the Australian Neosparassus species are green.  However, the eye pattern does not look like that of a typical huntsman and I have never previously seen a sparassid with what looks like a sharply narrowed end to its abdomen.  Unfortunately, the photos don’t show enough anatomical details for me to make a guess as to which other family this spider might belong to.  This specimen illustrates the fact that there are so many North Queensland spider species still waiting to be discovered and named.

You can extend this observation to many other critters in the Daintree Rainforest, a treasure trove of biodiversity and antiquity!

The scientist and his wife visited the Daintree to build on their research into primitive angiosperms and decided to book onto a guided interpreted nocturnal walk with Cooper Creek Wilderness.  Little did they know that they would be entering the heart of the world’s oldest rainforest!  In the blackness of the night, it would be difficult to assess the forest, but on this particular night the tour guide decided to include some of the unique vegetation in his interpretation.  Imagine the paleobotanist’s surprise when he was shown the ‘green dinosaur’.   Idiospermum australiense is our prime piece of evidence of continuity of rainforest growth over 135 million years.

Trapped in the refugial areas at the base of the eastern flank of Thornton Peak, the fruit and flowers of this primitive angiosperm were first found in 1902 by another German Botanist, Ludwig Diels, who matched it with a fossil held in the Dresden Herbarium.  Scientists who returned to the site of the discovery a year later, were dismayed to find that the rainforest had been cleared for sugarcane.  The plant was rediscovered in 1971 when some cattle belonging  to a local Daintree farmer ingested the toxic seeds and died.  The seeds were eventually matched with Dresden Herbarium records that revealed a previous reference to the species (Calycanthus australiensis) (Diels 1902), however taxonomic anomalies favoured the discovery of a new species, which became (Idiospermum australiensis).

At the time, there were only seventeen known families of primitive flowering plant on earth.  Idiospermaceae became the eighteenth and Austrobaileyaceae from the same rainforest, the nineteenth.  The re-discovery of the rainforest dinosaur stimulated intense botanical interest in the rainforests of the Daintree.  The scientific community had discovered a living museum of plants and animals of indeterminate antiquity.

Through DNA testing, Idiospermum australiense was re-classified back into the Calycanthaceae Family about 3 years ago.  This piece of information was conveyed to me by a retired dendrologist who visited Cooper Creek Wilderness about 15 years ago and returned again this year with Outback Spirit Tours.

We are now informed that our forest is somewhere between 160 and 170 million years old, 25 to 35 million years older than previously estimated!

The coincidence of Technische Universitat Dresden in this latest study and the original  discovery of Idiospermum australiense by a scientist from Dresden herbarium forges links from the other side of the world to the Daintree Rainforest and with the advantages of modern computers, scientific research unites findings from around the world to seek a universal truth.

As inhabitants of this prestigious rainforest we have become recipients of information that we can include in our interpretation.   Conservation of Daintree Rainforest is supported by travellers from around the world who are looking for exceptional natural experiences.  The web of knowledge expands beyond the scientific world to the cultural world of the traditional owners, the Yalanji people who tell me the plant is poisonous and cannot be eaten, and the early European  settlers who found the tree provided a fine cabinet timber called “ribbonwood.”