I'm based on Zhao & al. 2022 😉
I was actually reacting to the announcement which you reacted to, rather than to your comment itself. (Sorry if this was not obvious. I have edited my post and added your quote of Mike's original post. Hope it's a bit clearer now.)
I agree
Zhao et al's estimate of the age of this split is on the low side, but would hesitate to act on this alone.
For one, if there really are data for five additional taxa that would be part of the same group, I would want to see how including these taxa in the analysis affects the estimated age.
Second, I'm left a bit uncomfortable by how strongly conflicting some of the gene trees (see
supplementary data 2) for this group actually are. E.g., LDH has
Cyanoptila embedded in
Eumyias -- sister to
Eumyias thalassinus (BS = 99), with
E. indigo and
E. additus clading together (BS = 100) as their sister group; ODC has
E. thalassinus sister to
E. indigo (BS = 100), and
E. additus sister to these (BS = 99), while
Cyanoptila is basal in the group; mtDNA results in a monophyletic
Eumyias (BS = 100, PP = 1), like ODC and unlike LDH, but within this monophyletic
Eumyias,
E. thalassinus is closer to
E. additus than to
E. indigo (BS= 100, PP = 1), while it's the opposite in the ODC tree
... Given such conflicts, the first thing I would want to see is a confirmation that the sequences are genuine. Once (if) the data gets confirmed as genuine, I would also like to see a BEAST-type species tree, in addition to trees derived from the concatenation of data that tell what looks like totally incongruent stories.