In community ecology, diversity is often operationalized along three dimensions: taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional. Despite the proliferation of metrics to evaluate diversity, attempts to integrate these facets and to examine the interaction between evolutionary and ecological phenomena neglect the phenotypic diversification process. Through the extrapolation of the phylomorphospace, we introduce a presence-absence framework that measures the trajectory of trait diversification from both alpha and beta perspectives. Trait evolutionary history (TEH) estimates the ancestral phenotype of nodes and its mapping in a functional space links the pathway of trait evolution to species tips, generating functional branches, a variable depicting the amount of trait evolution per phylogenetic branch. Tempo (functional branch length) and mode (lineage density) are decoupled in alpha TEH, while beta TEH only examines tempo. The commonest approach to assess the trait-phylogeny relationship – phylogenetic signal – only quantifies the current statistical (non)dependence between trait and phylogenetic distances, without exploring past circumstances, rates or processes. TEH overcomes this blindspot by measuring the evolutionary pathways of trait diversification among communities, accounting for the interplay between phylogenetic relationships and interspecific trait variation. Biodiversity is the outcome of contemporary-ecological and historical-evolutionary phenomena, and the introduction of TEH represents the next step towards unifying community ecology and macroevolution.