This R package wraps some of the matrix exponentiation utilities from EXPOKIT, a Fortran 77 library that is widely recommended for matrix exponentiation (Sidje RB, 1998. "Expokit: A Software Package for Computing Matrix Exponentials." ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 24(1): 130-156). EXPOKIT includes functions for exponentiating both small, dense matrices, and large, sparse matrices (in sparse matrices, most of the cells have value 0).
Rapid matrix exponentiation is useful in phylogenetics when we have a large number of states (as we do when we are inferring the history of transitions between the possible geographic ranges of a species), but is probably useful in other ways as well.