The largest unbroken stretch of rainforest is in the Amazon river basin of South America. The Amazon basin spans at least 6 million square kilometers, which is 2.3 million square miles. That is nearly twice the size of India. As of November 2026, the rainforest covers about 80 percent of the Amazon basin. The largest rainforests on Earth surround the Amazon River in South America and the Congo River in Africa.

As of November 2026, the Amazon rainforest is home to around 40,000 plant species, nearly 1,300 bird species and 3,000 types of fish. It has more than 430 species of mammals and 2.5 million different insects. It also has an estimated 400 billion trees. The Amazon is home to about 10 percent of the world's known species.

Tropical wet forests have more species of trees than any other biome. A single hectare of tropical rainforest can hold hundreds of species of trees. A hectare is 2.5 acres. Some rainforest trees grow as tall as 60 meters, which is 200 feet.

The Amazon is the largest river on Earth by the volume of water it carries. As of November 2026, the Amazon River's flow is about 15 percent of all the fresh water that rivers discharge into the oceans. A tropical rainforest can get more than 2,000 millimeters, or 79 inches, of rain in a year.

Now meet three rainforest animals. A sloth's digestive system is so slow that it comes down from the trees only about once a week. An orangutan's arms stretch out longer than its body. They measure over 7 feet, or 2 meters, from fingertip to fingertip. Bats are the most diverse mammals in most tropical rainforests.

Ants learned to farm 50 million years ago, way before humans did. The fungus the ants grow is the only food source for the leaf-cutter ant. Many rainforest trees have buttresses, which are large aerial extensions of their surface roots. Tank bromeliads hold water that a wide range of animals use.

People use what grows in the rainforest. As of November 2026, about 90 percent of all natural rubber comes from the Brazilian rubber tree. About a quarter of the medicines used today come from plants found in tropical rainforests. The cacao tree, the source of chocolate, comes from the Amazon region. As of July 2023, about 2.5 million Indigenous people live in the Pan Amazon region of South America.

Here are two numbers for forest loss. Between 2010 and 2020, the net loss in forests worldwide was 4.7 million hectares per year, as of November 2026. Loss of tropical primary forest reached 6.7 million hectares in 2024, in University of Maryland data on Global Forest Watch, as of November 2026.

Now look at what is new to science. Scientists did not know of okapis until 1901. The okapi, a rainforest animal of the Congo, is the only close living relative of the giraffe. As of November 2026, scientists are still finding new species in tropical rainforests.

Words to know

• hectare: 2.5 acres
• species: kind of life
• buttresses: big root braces
• biome: type of habitat
• Indigenous: first peoples