fastMRCA: Get the MRCA (or height above the root of the MRCA) of a pair of tip taxa
Description
This function returns the most recent common ancestor (node number) for a pair of taxa; or, in the case of fastHeight, the height above the root of the MRCA of a pair of taxa; or, in the case of fastDist, the patristic distance between a pair of taxa.
The node number of the MRCA, the height above the root (for fastHeight), or the patristic distance between two taxa (for fastDist).
Details
This function is mostly redundant with findMRCA (or findMRCA(...,type="height") in the case of fastHeight) but for very large trees will be considerably faster. (Also see getMRCA in the ape package.)
References
Revell, L. J. (2012) phytools: An R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol. Evol., 3, 217-223.