Abstract: Wood density indicates important plant functions and plays a key role in carbon cycling of forest ecosystems by affecting wood decomposition. However, how wood density varies globally and how it evolved through the evolutionary history of angiosperms remain unclear. Here, by integrating data of wood density, phylogeny, and distributions for angiosperms worldwide, we estimated global spatiotemporal patterns of wood density and their relationships with modern climate and paleoclimate. We found that mean wood density decreased with latitude in the northern hemisphere but increased with latitude in the southern hemisphere. The interspecific wood density variation within each geographic unit did not show clear latitudinal gradients. Temperature was the best predictor of the global geographic pattern in mean wood density, while the geographic variation in mean wood density across high-temperature regions could be explained by geographic variation in precipitation and precipitation seasonality. Since the Cenozoic (66 million years ago (Mya)), wood density increased first (until 20 Mya) and then decreased. In general, the Cenozoic wood density was positively correlated with paleotemperature and negatively correlated with paleoprecipitation, especially during more arid periods. Interestingly, the evolutionary trends of wood density on different continents differed, which corresponded to the divergence in wood density patterns and their relationships with modern climate on different continents. Our results highlight the dominant effect of environmental temperature on global variation in angiosperm wood density with an additional strong effect of precipitation seasonality. Our study also demonstrates the critical role of aridity and biogeographic idiosyncrasies in driving angiosperm wood density evolution.