Prehistoric lumber

Energy & Sustainability Furniture & Lighting

I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

View more articles by Sean Michael Ragan

@seanragan

August 2nd, 2009 12

Ancientwood, Ltd., is a US company that imports 50,000-year-old Kauri logs that have been preserved for millennia in peat bogs under New Zealand’s northern island. Besides its value as a conversation piece, ancient Kauri is mined, rather than logged, and no live trees are killed in the process. Kauri trees (Agathis spp.) thrive in New Zealand to this day, but supposedly the preserved ancient specimens have unique properties all their own, including a very rare form of iridescence called “whitebait.”