Some parts of the Australian landscape are more than 100 million years old. The dinosaurs roamed a land in which Kakadu, the Macdonnell and Flinders ranges, the Arcoona Plateau and the Mt Lofty Ranges, and many parts of the Yilgarn Craton of Western Australia and the Eastern Uplands were recognisably present. Landscape remnants of equal age are probably preserved in other continents, in parts of southern Africa and South America, for instance, but a combination of circumstances has permitted many of the very old Australian surfaces to be dated with reasonable confidence. Thus in Australia some landscape elements are much older than the accepted theory suggests they ought to be. This has serious implications for general geomorphological theory and for the conventional models of landscape evolution.
