diff --git a/DESCRIPTION b/DESCRIPTION
index b323ba8..302b436 100644
--- a/DESCRIPTION
+++ b/DESCRIPTION
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Imports:
     latticeExtra,
     tidyr
 Roxygen: list(markdown = TRUE)
-RoxygenNote: 7.2.3
+RoxygenNote: 7.3.1
 LinkingTo:
     Rcpp, RcppArmadillo
 Suggests: 
diff --git a/R/pglmm-utils.R b/R/pglmm-utils.R
index 0f51c0e..f483f77 100755
--- a/R/pglmm-utils.R
+++ b/R/pglmm-utils.R
@@ -32,6 +32,8 @@ parse_conv_ranef = function(x, df){
       Vphy = Vphy[spl, spl] # same order as species levels
     }
     
+    if(inherits(xx, "dist")) xx = as.matrix(xx)
+    
     if(inherits(xx, c("matrix", "Matrix"))){
       # already a cov matrix
       if(length(setdiff(spl, row.names(xx))))