My research emphasizes the integration of data from living and fossil organisms to study the origins and the fates of lineages and adaptations. Comparative analysis of different macroevolutionary currencies – taxonomic, functional, and morphologic – has been an especially powerful approach, and my group has been compiling 3D images of several thousand extant and extinct bivalve species to fuel this work. Main research areas include: (1) the interplay of origination, extinction, and range shifts in shaping global diversity patterns in time and space. The fossil record shows that the "tropics-as-cradle-or-museum" paradigm of the past 40 years for the latitudinal diversity gradient is a false dichotomy, with the tropics actually being an evolutionary source of expanding lineages that also accumulate in their tropical starting points. (2) The role of geographic range, larval development, and other biological factors in determining speciation rates and patterns in Cretaceous and Cenozoic mollusks. Hierarchical approaches to large-scale evolutionary processes appear to be powerful tools for understanding macroevolutionary patterns. Once background patterns are understood, they can (3) be compared to patterns of extinction and survival during mass extinctions to gain a better picture of the evolutionary significance of extinction events. Work on the end-Cretaceous extinction indicates neither a simple intensification of background patterns nor an entirely random culling of the biota, and analyses on the early Cenozoic evolutionary rebound shows distinct differences among biogeographic regions and among clades, suggesting that evolutionary patterns are shaped by the alternation of extinction regimes, with rare but influential mass extinctions driving unexpected evolutionary shifts. Analysis of both background and mass extinction along latitudinal and bathymetric gradients, and spatial and environmental histories of major evolutionary novelties and higher taxa in post-Paleozoic marine invertebrates, are also active research projects based on the primary literature and museum collections.