Five chloroplast coding and non-coding regions, one mitochondrial gene and its associated intron, and part of one nuclear ribosomal gene were sequenced, giving a total included aligned length of 7,845 bp. Samples from six collections, representing five species of Jensenia from South America, Malaysia, and New Zealand, four collections belonging to three species of Pallavicinia and one collection of Podomitrium phyllanthus comprised the ingroup, which was rooted on Symphyogyna marginata. Phylogenetic analysis under the maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood criteria support Jensenia as monophyletic. Within Jensenia, two monophyletic clades are resolved, one comprising the four Latin American collections and the other, the Malayasian and New Zealand species; however, this is based on only 16 parsimony informative characters. The lack of informative characters within Jensenia suggests that the divergence among taxa is relatively recent, rather than Gondwanan, as has been hypothesized based on geographical distribution. A corollary of this is that the present day distribution of Jensenia is likely the product of dispersal rather than vicariance.