Nowadays supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) as an alternative is popular in food and pharmaceutical industries but its large scale application is often restricted economically by the confliction between recovery efficiency and selectivity. In this article, a simple but novel and efficient combined method was investigated for separating coumarins from Angelica dahurica. The experimental results showed that combining SFE and liquid-liquid extraction could improve both extraction selectivity and separation efficiency, enriching easily coumarins from 0.144% in the herb to as much as 41.68% in the concentrate. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.