0 INTRODUCTION Twenty years ago we wrote a monograph on historical biogeography that was published in 1986 in the Oxford University Press Monograph Series on Biogeography (Humphries & Parenti, 1986). We summarized and interpreted the field of cladistic biogeography as it stood at the time for the undergraduate, graduate student and professional biologist, and as it had developed in concert with the cladistic revolution in phylogenetic methods (i.e., Hennig, 1966; Nelson & Platnick, 1981; Wiley, 1981). During the following decade, biogeography enjoyed a renaissance, particularly in methodology, and we wrote a second edition of our book in large part to summarize advances made during the 1990s (Humphries & Parenti, 1999). A challenge facing biologists today is to understand the enormous amount and variety of information that is being generated and archived in databases, particularly those in systematics collections documenting global species diversity over time for discovering a pattern. Biogeographic patterns provide an organizing framework within which we may interpret biological data, as well as provide the basic information for understanding relationships among areas. Well-corroborated biogeographic patterns have a high predictive value. They may inform other phylogenetic studies, by predicting where a primitive sister group may live; reinforce conservation studies, by identifying species, endemic areas and complementary hot spots; or simplify our understanding of, hence our explanations for, patterns of diversity, by proposing a common cause of our observations in the sense of Life and Earth evolving together rather than a series of unrelated events, such as dispersal scenarios. Biogeography is more relevant now than it has perhaps ever been, and it is time for yet another renaissance. Many terms have been coined that pull together diverse bits of biological information: biodiversity, bioinformatics, biocomplexity, and so on. None of these can replace the power of "historical biogeography" that asks a simple question: What lives where, and why? And, the subject is bold enough to suggest some answers to that ques1\1 DRE,