You would not expect to find a rainforest in what is now one of the hottest and driest places on the east coast of Queensland.
Ancient fossil deposits found in caves near Rockhampton in central Queensland have revealed the area was once a tropical rainforest, wiped out by climate change.
The caves are providing new evidence of how rapidly global warming can affect the environment.
In 1998, palaeontologist Scott Hocknull from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane first travelled to the caves near Mt Etna, just outside Rockhampton.
He thought he might find the remnants of a few fossil sites, but limestone mining in the area had uncovered a treasure trove of ancient material.
"If you imagine this cave system is an Olympic swimming pool - it's a massive big hole in the ground that filled up with sediment and bone and teeth of ancient animals over millions of years, that's basically what you've got," Mr Hocknull said.
"Then the mines have cut it in a cross section, so you're looking at a typical limestone mine, but inside that limestone mine is the remains of an ancient cave system."
The collection of fossils is comprehensive and there are some interesting surprises, including animals that have never before been heard of.
"I'm talking [about] a bulldog-sized ring-tailed possum and a carnivorous marsupial lion the size of a tabby cat, so it is a dwarf marsupial lion, so it's a very strange beastie and giant pythons and land dwelling crocodiles in amongst the animals that are now only found in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and the wet tropics of northern Queensland," he said.
But as the team worked through the discoveries one thing became very clear, this now hot and dry mining region was once a tropical rainforest.
"In fact where we were looking for fossils to begin with we were actually to find arid zone beasties like bilbies and pig-footed bandicoots and bearded dragons and goannas," he said.
"We certainly found those deposits but they're much younger than these rainforest critters so what we're finding is something unlike anything else found in Australia before."
The caves provide the most continuos record of rainforest animal species over the last five million years.
Mr Hocknull says because humans were not in the picture when these animals were alive, their eventual extinction can only be linked to climate change.
He says it appears that happened much faster than previously thought.
"We're seeing a rapid extinction event, we're talking something that might've only taken a few thousand years, maybe a little bit longer but a very short period of time in a geological sense to occur," Mr Hocknull said.
"Now the exciting thing about this is looking at the extinction of rainforests and changing climate in the absence of humans because what we can then do is look at how that has changed through the presence of humans and understand what the difference was and that difference will be our major impact on the environment."
Mr Hocknull says the information can help scientists understand what effect future climate change will have on the Earth's precious rainforest ecosystems, and how they can be saved.
But the prognosis does not look good.
"We know that each time it's gone dry and cold, each time it's gone into an ice age, that ice age has become progressively worse, so it doesn't hold out good hope for the rainforest in the future," he said,
"What it means is we have to really think about how we can conserve that biodiversity so that when things do start to dry up again and I'm talking about long-term droughts, how we're going to react to that change from a human perspective but also from our ecology's perspective."
