Premise of research. The Sandpaper clade comprises a group of taxa endemic to the Greater Antilles and forms a subgroup of a larger Caribbean assemblage of Miconieae. Numerous species within this monophyletic group share striking morphological characters and thus traditionally have been considered close relatives. Recent phylogenetic work has shown that not all of these species are each other’s closest relatives, and they actually form three distinct clades: the Lima, Paralima, and Pseudolima clades. We reconstructed a phylogeny of these poorly known species to test patterns of morphological evolution and the biogeographic history of the clade.Methodology. We reconstructed a phylogeny of the Sandpaper clade using two plastid intergenic spacers (accD-psaI, psbK-psbL) and two nuclear ribosomal spacers (ITS, ETS) and then sequenced three more plastid spacers for the Lima clade (rpl32-trnL, trnV-ndhC, trnH-psbA) to provide better resolution among those species. The biogeographic history and the evolution of m...