Tropical rainforests cover only 6% of the planet’s surface but in terms of biodiversity, they contain more than 50% of the world’s terrestrial plant and animal species. On plants alone, tropical rainforests are thought to be the exclusive home for 170,000 of the world’s 250,000 known plant species.
The largest intact tropical rainforest in the world is in the Amazon River Basin and it dwarfs the Malaysian rainforests in size by far. However, age-wise, the Amazon jungle’s estimated age of 55 to 70 million years is way younger. Estimated at around 130 million years old, Malaysia’s rainforests is host to some of the most diverse tropical ecosystems in the world. During the Ice Age, Southeast Asia’s rainforests continued to experience moist temperatures due to its geographical location. This, in turn, allowed them to develop much earlier than the tropical rainforests of Africa and South America, the Amazon included.
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