Distinction between "Node age" and "height"

[Dylan]

Hello all,

I am analyzing the results of a BEAST run in which I used a known rate
of molecular evolution to calibrate a species tree for a single gene.
I looked at the log file output by BEAST, and all the ESS values were
good, and the tMRCAs for my focal groups were reasonable, too.
However, when I created a summary tree using TreeAnnotator (with like
5% burnin) I got a tree in which the "Node ages" and "heights" were
different. I looked through old postings, and just found the one shown
below, which had a single response indicating that the person had not
called the right kind of summary when creating the consensus tree in
TreeAnnotator. In TreeAnnotator I selected "Maximum clade credibility
tree" under the "Target tree type" option, and selected "Mean heights"
under the "Node heights" option. I am using the v1.5.3 package of
BEAST.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Cheers,

DOB

Past post on the same subject:

"So I'm a little confused as to the distinction between these,
intuitively I feel that on a ultrametric tree that the node-age
should
equal the node-height and this is what I have previously observed
when
using older versions of BEAST. However, I have just re-run an older
analysis with slightly revised calibration points, but otherwise an
identical XML file using v.1-5-1 and now both "Node-ages" and
"Height"
are different to one another. Is this an error with this version of
BEAST or have I misunderstood a subtle distinction between the two?"