Plants of the wet tropics - North Queensland - ferns and cycads

Here you can see a number of epiphytic ferns growing on a tree in the rainforest

Ferns growing on a palm tree, North Queensland

The plants of Queensland: Bill Bryson explains:

The Daintree forest is a remnant of a time when the world was a single land mass, the whole covered in steamy growth. [The single land mass is called Pangea.] As time passed, continuents split up and drifted off to the far corners of the globe, but the Daintree [and the rest of N.Queensland], through some tectonic fluke, escaped the more dramatic transformations of climate and orientations that spurred ecological change elsewhere. In consequence, there are plants out there - whole families of plants - that survived as nowhere else. In 1972, scientists began to appreciate just how ancient and exceptional Australia's northern rainforest is when some cattle mysteriously sickened and died after grazing in the jungle's lower slopes. The cows, it turned out, had been poisoned by the seeds of a tree called Idiospermum australianse. What was unexpected about this was that Idiospermum was thought to have vanished from the earth 100 million years ago. In fact, it was doing very well in the Daintree, as were eleven other members of its family, a primitive outpost of botany called the angiosperms, from which all flowering plants are descended.

Campsite, Cairns. I think this is an Elkhorn Fern. These grow in rainforests and other moist forests on trees and rocks from a rhizome which is protected by nest leaves that enclose the base of the plant. The shield fronds are deeply lobed, whilst the fertile fronds stand semi-erect or nodding, and become pendulous with age.

This could be a Bird's nest fern or it could be the same as the above. It shows how they get started. 

I think this one at the bottom is a scaly tree fern. These fast-growing ferns grow up to 15m and have very slender woody trunks thickened at the base with distinctive oval leaf scars. The leaves can be up to four metres long.

What kind of cycad is this? Not sure but these have separate male and female plants with the reproductive structures arising from the centre of the plant. This, I think, is a male cone.

These pictures are from Rockhampton Botanicals which are gorgeous and very informative and entirely free to visit. I am copying information from a field guild by Martin Cohen and Julia Cooper. Sadly only one picture per plant which isn't ideal.

This is the information board in the botanicals in Mackay - very helpful, hope you can read it.

Another cycad (on the left)