The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven't sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies.
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Read through the posted link. Very interesting. Having been an aspiring paleontologist up throught the MS, I think this business of dating lineages based on fossils is pretty scary. Fortunately the group I have done the most systematic work on, the family Rivulidae of the Aplocheiloid killifishes, have, so far as I know, no fossil representatives. There have been two independent DNA trees done for the Aplocheiloids, and they are similar enought that we might actually know something. When relationships and distributions are compared to continental drift maps, one feels pretty confident as to what the vicariant events were. So we can date the vicariant events based on geological, but nonfossil, information. We have revised one Rivulid genus based on DNA. The sequence of speciation events and the geological history of that part of South America correlate very nicely. Talking around, workers in other fish groups are coming up with the same sort of scenario. If all this is so, the modern bony fishes originated earlier than we have thought, and diversification was rapid early on.