Understanding biodiversity is fundamental to biology. To do so, we need to know the evolutionary tree of life (phylogeny), where organisms live (biogeography), and how they interact with their environment (ecology). For my masters thesis, I am generating a fully-sampled molecular phylogeny of the avian order Coraciiformes (kingfishers and allies) using Ultraconserved Elements to generate thousands of DNA sequences (akin to "molecular fossils") to use in analyses.