Since Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”, evolutionary biologists have continued to marvel at the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that organisms express, yet we are only beginning to understand how this enormous diversity arises at the mechanistic level. Angiosperms are the most diverse group within the plant kingdom, representing nearly 300,000 species worldwide and thriving in most environments, forming complex relationships with many biotic (e.g., pollinator syndromes, mycorrhizal symbiosis) and abiotic factors (e.g., soil specializations, adaptability to different precipitation levels), which leads to great variety in both form and function. The Asteraceae family is the most speciose of all angiosperms and exemplifies diversity of form and function, adapting to almost every biome on the planet, comprised of over 30,000 species and 1,900 genera, or roughly 10% of all species of angiosperms. The Asteraceae inflorescence, a capitulum, is thought to be a major driver of diversification in the family. The capitulum is a composite structure which comprises multiple flowers often mimicking the structure and shape of a single flower. Some members of the family arrange multiple heads together into a higher order functional unit, a secondary head, also known as capitulescence or syncephalium, that in many cases also resembles a single flower. In this presentation I will give an overview of the prevalence of secondary heads across the Asteraceae family and will also review the leading hypothesis on how secondary heads have arisen. The two hypotheses outlining the genetic underpinnings of the evolution of the secondary head are 1) secondary heads arose from a single determinate meristem which subdivided into a multiflowered head, or alternatively, 2) secondary heads arose from cymose units which normal capitula have lost over their evolutionary history. Whichever may be the case, secondary heads have been hypothesized to affect pollinator preference and play a role in species and habitat diversification. Secondary heads occur within 70 genera of Asteraceae, most of which are of the New World. One such genus, Dyssodia, is a small clade of only four species possessing both normal capitula, as well as one species that produces secondary heads and for these reasons I will use this system as a model to investigate the genetic underpinnings of secondary head evolution.