Cremation jewelry made from ancient kauri wood holds the secrets of a natural phenomenon that occurred 50,000 years ago in the kauri forests of New Zealand - tens of thousands of years after wooly mammoths roamed the earth, and tens of thousands of years before the glaciers formed what are known today as the Great Lakes. No one knows exactly how it happened, but something in nature caused the ancient forest where 2,000 year-old kauri trees grew to be buried beneath a peat bog. There, the wood was mysteriously and perfectly preserved until it was discovered and harvested by modern excavators.