After describing DISTIQUE, we show that the anchoring approach can be generalized to any tree inference problem. Assume we have a way to compute the topology and the internal branch length for any quartet of leaves. We show that as long as this quartet estimator is consistent, our anchoring mechanism and a certain family of transformations can be used to compute an additive distance matrix, which in turn can be used to infer the correct tree topology but not correct branch lengths. This result is rather surprising because, for any pair of anchors and a pair of other leaves, the quartet internal branch length will often be very different from the distance between non-anchor leaves. Thus, anchoring produces incorrect pairwise distances that are nevertheless additive for the correct tree topology. DISTIQUE uses anchoring because for the MSC-based species tree inference, pairwise species distances are not straightforward to define but inferring quartet trees is easy. We evaluate the accuracy of DISTIQUE on simulated and biological data and show that its accuracy is competitive with the best alternative methods even when used with relatively small subsets of all possible anchors.