Tom Nightingale reported this story on Monday, October 28, 2013 12:50:00

ELEANOR HALL: Australian scientists have found what they're calling a 'lost world' in a rainforest in far north Queensland. They had to helicopter in to a plateau that's impossible to reach on foot, and in just four days exploring only a tenth of the plateau, they found three new species.



As Tom Nightingale reports, the scientists are already planning their next trip.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: Hundreds of kilometres north of Cairns, Cape Melville has dark granite boulders that perch on top of each other next to the ocean.



Dr Conrad Hoskin says it's an amazing sight.



CONRAD HOSKIN: The rocks are about five or 10 or 20 or 30 metres wide, big each, and they're just piled up, thousands, millions of rocks just all piled up, so the entire pile of rocks is about 500 metres high. And then on top of that you get a rainforest plateau.



It's mind-blowing. Have you seen the photos? They're incredible.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: Doctor Hoskin is with James Cook University.



CONRAD HOSKIN: Around you up top are these lovely wet rainforests with patches of boulders here and there, and moist ridgelines with dripping rocks and everything like that. It's an absolutely amazing place with foxtail palms and hoop pines and things sticking out. It's a magic place up the top.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: He's wanted to explore the plateau for years, especially after looking at the rainforest on Google Earth. So, earlier this year, he and another researcher took a helicopter.



CONRAD HOSKIN: The problem at the top is you've got all this cloud coming in off the sea and it sits up the top of the mountain rain as just heavy mist and cloud.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: So you couldn't land the chopper?



CONRAD HOSKIN: No, we couldn't get in. So what we did was I then organised a trip with a guy, Tim Laman from National Geographic. Then when we flew in by helicopter that time it was cloudy and misty and all the rest of it, but we managed to get in amongst the clouds.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: What they found was beyond his wildest expectations. In four days they found three previously undiscovered species - a skink, a frog and a bizarre looking gecko.



CONRAD HOSKIN: That was probably the highlight just because leaf tail geckos are these spectacular big amazing looking geckos. All these things are amazing, they're really distinct new species and they've all got their relatives off in other rainforest areas in North Queensland.



And what this shows is that Cape Melville's just been sitting there doing its own thing just for millions of years, completely isolated from other upland rainforest areas. So these creatures have been isolated up on the, in the rainforest and just gradually diverged to become different things.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: Dr Hoskin estimates they only covered, at most, 10 per cent of the plateau in the four days. He says it's highly significant to find several previously undiscovered invertebrate species in a small part of one area.



He says the next trip will involve surveying birds, insects and snails to see what else exists in the rainforests of Cape Melville.



CONRAD HOSKIN: In Australia we feel like we know it fairly well. In some groups, particularly like vertebrates, these kinds of places just show us that we don't know it fully yet at all. We've got these amazing, almost undiscovered places, let alone the other small little patches here and there where there'll be a new species of invertebrates and things like that.



So this kind of highlights that's there still amazing places even in Australia to be thoroughly explored.



TOM NIGHTINGALE: And when are you going back?



CONRAD HOSKIN: We'll go back sometime in the next couple of months for a follow up trip, and finding three vertebrates indicates that there's going to be a lot of other undiscovered stuff up there.



ELEANOR HALL: Exciting. That's Dr Conrad Hoskin from the James Cook University ending Tom Nightingale's report.