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One of my Christmas pressies this year was an original copy of Walter Keeping’s (1883) classic work on the Cretaceous fossils of Upware & Brickhill (1/n)
Keeping wrote this as an extended essay for an undergraduate prize (the Sedgwick Prize) when he studied geology @EarthSciCam @christs_college and his collections are still held @SedgwickMuseum - he provided detailed stratigraphic logs and fossil descriptions (2/n)
He also showed many of the fossils were reworked from older deposits, and this is a great example of the detective work in untangling the different signals they give to stratigraphers (3/n)
Sadly this kind of classic taxonomy study is much rarer these days as most training programmes in palaeo (in the UK at least) focus more heavily on macroevolution and palaeobiology while ignoring fundamental taxonomic skills (4/n)
As for Keeping, despite a promising career first @SedgwickMuseum then @uniwales and finally @YorkshireMuseum he died young in 1888 at the age of only 34. He published a handful of papers on UK geology that are still some of the only references on particular deposits (5/n)
However, his legacy lives on in collections @SedgwickMuseum and in his contributions to UK regional geology. His work is likely to be cited long after many current palaeobiological papers are forgotten as they’re superseded by new methods (6/n)
The message? Taxonomy and basic field studies are vital and should be fundamental to training - a good understanding of these primary data will only improve downstream analyses and provide new high quality data for further broader scale studies (7/end)
