Recent advances in understanding the tectonic and paleoenvironmental history of the Caribbean region allow formulation of biogeographic and evolution/speciation models within an improved physical context. Support is developing for a new ‘maximist’ model of geological history suggesting that the Greater Antilles originated as a submerged volcanic island arc in the present Isthmian region during the Early Cretaceous [Valanginian; ∼130 m.y. (million years ago)] and moved more than 1000 km to their present location. Geologic investigations are not always concerned with whether an arc is submerged or emergent, but the proto-Greater Antillean arc began colliding with the Bahamas Platform in the Paleocene/earliest Eocene (∼56 m.y.), and the principal period of emergence allowing terrestrial flora and fauna to colonize was in the middle Eocene (∼49 m.y.). Early emergence was during the later phases of the hothouse interval of the Late Cretaceous through the early Eocene, which was followed by an intermediate period when climates fluctuated between non-glacial and (marginally) glacial conditions (middle Eocene through the early Miocene), and culminated in the icehouse interval of the late Tertiary and Quaternary Periods. The recent geological/paleoenvironmental models still constitute, however, a broad spectrum of possibilities for biogeographic-evolutionary-speciation events within which specialists must formulate the most probable pathway(s) for individual taxa.