For most analysis, this function is not accessed by the user, but is called from within surfaceForward to initialize the run with a single-regime OU model. However, the user can optionally supply a starting model that imposes some regime shifts (e.g. if there is strong a priori reason to include them, or to evaluate how their inclusion changes the result of SURFACE analysis). If shifts are supplied, they are always modified so that the first element codes a basal regime 'shift' c("1"="a"). Thus, if any other element in shifts is specified as regime "a", or has name "1", an error will be returned. startingModel can also be used to obtain a fit (with AICc calculated after adding log-likelihoods across traits) for any hypothesized Hansen model or for Brownian motion (if brownian=TRUE) for comparison with models returned by SURFACE