  Phylogenetic tree comparison metrics are an important tool in the study of
evolution, and hence the definition of such metrics is an interesting problem
in phylogenetics. In a paper in Taxon fifty years ago, Sokal and Rohlf proposed
to measure quantitatively the difference between a pair of phylogenetic trees
by first encoding them by means of their half-matrices of cophenetic values,
and then comparing these matrices. This idea has been used several times since
then to define dissimilarity measures between phylogenetic trees but, to our
knowledge, no proper metric on weighted phylogenetic trees with nested taxa
based on this idea has been formally defined and studied yet. Actually, the
cophenetic values of pairs of different taxa alone are not enough to single out
phylogenetic trees with weighted arcs or nested taxa. In this paper we define a
family of cophenetic metrics that compare phylogenetic trees on a same set of
taxa by encoding them by means of their vectors of cophenetic values of pairs
of taxa and depths of single taxa, and then computing the $L^p$ norm of the
difference of the corresponding vectors. Then, we study, either analytically or
numerically, some of their basic properties: neighbors, diameter, distribution,
and their rank correlation with each other and with other metrics.
