William Keeton

Keeton is the namesake of William Keeton House, a residential house of Cornell University that opened in 2008. He is also the namesake of the Keeton Prize, established in 1991 and awarded by faculty to outstanding Cornell undergraduate students.

Keeton died from heart attack on August 17, 1980, due to a failure of a mechanical heart valve. He was 47 years old.

In William Keeton's 1970 Magnets Interfere with Pigeon Homing paper, William Keeton proved that pigeons were affected by changes in the magnetic field surrounding them, and that pigeons were using the earth's magnetic field as one way of finding their way home. In this experiment, William Keeton attached magnets to the back of pigeons just before they were released and measured their vanishing point (in what direction they had flown out of sight) and the time it took to find their way home for both the experimental birds and with the control birds (control birds had a piece of brass glued to their back of the same weight as the magnet).

William Keeton is also known for his work in writing the biology textbook named Biological Science, that was first published by the W.W. Norton & Company in 1967. It took Keeton approximately five years to write the first edition of the textbook. It went through three editions before his death in 1980. After Keeton's death the textbook was revised for editions 4, 5, and 6 by James L. Gould (and Carol Gould). The textbook was a combination of both botany and zoology. This combination of sciences turned out to be extremely successful in teaching many aspects of biology. The textbook was one of the first that integrated zoology and botany and sought common themes, guided by the process of evolution.

Prior to his work on animal navigation, Keeton studied the systematics and taxonomy of millipedes. His Master's thesis at Virginia Tech was a revision of the genus Brachoria, a Xystodesmid of the order Polydesmida. His doctoral research at Cornell resulted in a monograph of the family Spirobolidae (order Spirobolida) published in 1960, that garnered praise as bringing order and clarity to "a chaos of unrelated genera replete with poorly-known species". He split the family into two subfamilies and reduced the number of species through synonymy - determining that various named species actually belonged to previously described species. He made many field excursions to the Appalachian Mountains with fellow millipede expert Richard L. Hoffman, and also made an extended collecting trip to the Vulcan San Martin of Veracruz, Mexico. He published a total of 13 works on millipedes, in which he named 19 new species, two new genera, and the new families Allopocockiidae and Floridobolidae, both of the order Spirobolida. He also studied development and morphogenesis, and worked with Dr. Thomas Eisner on characterizing the defensive secretions of six species of the order Spirostreptida.

Keeton was a noted and well-known Biological Science 101 professor beginning in 1958, so much so that his popularity as a professor earned his class the nickname of the "Keeton course". In addition to his teaching Keeton is known for his work with pigeons and bird orientation and navigation, as he studied pigeon homing behaviors for well over a decade.

William Tinsley Keeton (February 3, 1933 – August 17, 1980) was an American zoologist known internationally for his work on animal behavior, especially bird migration, and for his work on millipede taxonomy. He was a well-liked professor of biology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and author of a widely used introductory textbook, Biological Science.

William Keeton was born February 3, 1933, in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up in Lynchburg. Keeton attended the University of Chicago and received both his Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Science degrees, working under Dr. Alfred E. Emerson. Keeton earned a master's degree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), during which he revised the millipede genus Brachoria. During his time at Virginia Tech, Keeton met Barbara Orcutt, whom he married in 1958. He moved to Cornell University in 1956 in order to continue his research with millipede systematics for his doctorate, where he studied under Dr. Howard E. Evans. His doctoral research culminated in a monograph on the family Spirobolidae. He received his doctorate in 1958 and joined the biology faculty at Cornell University as a biology professor in 1958.