It is my hope that this collection of reviews can be profitably read by all who are interested in evolutionary biology. However, I would like to specifically target it for two disparate groups of biologists seldom men- tioned in the same sentence, classical ichthyologists and molecular biologists. Since classical times, and perhaps even before, ichthyologists have stood in awe at the tremendous diversity of fishes. The bulk of effort in the field has always been directed toward understanding this diversity, i. e., extracting from it a coherent picture of evolutionary processes and lineages....