The granite of Cape Melville is old almost beyond comprehension - molten rock that cooled some 250 million years ago, in the Permian, and has been weathering ever since into a field of immense rounded boulders. Geologists call it the Altanmoui granite, and over a quarter of a billion years wind and water have sculpted it into towers and balanced blocks, some the size of houses, stacked and split and tumbled across the slopes. From the bay below, the range looks like a grey wave frozen mid-break. Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys, sailing past on HM Kangaroo in 1815, took one look and named it Stoney Cape - plain and accurate - before changing his mind and renaming it for a Lord of the Admiralty. The cape sits at the eastern edge of Princess Charlotte Bay, with small reef islands - Pipon, Hales, King - scattered offshore in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. But it is the boulders that define the place, and what lives among them.

Beneath the boulder-fields and the canopy that shades them, a pocket of rainforest has survived for millions of years, buffered from drought and fire by the cool, humid air trapped between the stones. In March 2013 a team of scientists and filmmakers - among them biologist Conrad Hoskin of James Cook University - reached the misty forest atop the range, joining the tiny number of people ever to stand there. What they found made headlines around the world. A new species of leaf-tailed gecko, long-limbed and huge-eyed, perfectly built for hunting across vertical rock in the dark. A golden-hued shade skink. A boulder-dwelling frog that shelters deep in the rock through the dry season and emerges in the rains to breed. Animals that had been evolving in isolation, unseen, the whole time.

The most striking of the discoveries was the leaf-tailed gecko, which Hoskin and Queensland Museum herpetologist Patrick Couper described and named Saltuarius eximius. The species name is Latin for exceptional - and the creature earns it, with a slender body, unusually long limbs and large grey eyes adapted to a lightless world of stone. It was known at first from only a handful of individuals, all within the same small patch of boulder-strewn rainforest, found nowhere else on Earth. The cape's roll call of endemic life runs longer still: the elegant Foxtail Palm, Wodyetia bifurcata - named for an Aboriginal bushman, Wodyeti - clings to the exposed granite hilltops, a plant unknown to science until the late twentieth century and now grown in gardens worldwide.

For all that the 2013 expedition was described as reaching a place few humans had seen, Cape Melville has belonged to people for a very long time. Its Traditional Owners, connected closely to the Flinders Islands people, know themselves as the Yiithuwarra - the Saltwater People - and their occupation of this coast, known as Othawa, is written into the land in shell middens, burial places and rock art. The national park that now protects the cape is jointly managed with the Yiithuwarra, who hold the deeper knowledge of a landscape outsiders only recently learned to read. The boulders that scientists call a lost world have, for the Saltwater People, never been lost at all.