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• Premise: Bromeliaceae form a large, ecologically diverse family of angiosperms native to the New World. We use a bromeliad phylogeny based on eight plastid regions to analyze relationships within the family, test a new, eight‐subfamily classification, infer the chronology of bromeliad evolution and invasion of different regions, and provide the basis for future analyses of trait evolution and rates of diversification.

• Methods: We employed maximum‐parsimony, maximum‐likelihood, and Bayesian approaches to analyze 9341 aligned bases for four outgroups and 90 bromeliad species representing 46 of 58 described genera. We calibrate the resulting phylogeny against time using penalized likelihood applied to a monocot‐wide tree based on plastid ndhF sequences and use it to analyze patterns of geographic spread using parsimony, Bayesian inference, and the program S‐DIVA.

• Results: Bromeliad subfamilies …