Help with jawbone ageing

[readonly]

Aging by tooth WEAR has an element of error, but aging by tooth REPLACEMENT is accurate. Fawn teeth are easy to age. Yearling teeth have a different structure (for lack of a better term) than fawn teeth. Yearlings do not have adult premolars yet. They have very soft premolars that wear extremely fast. Some guys see those well worn, flattened premolars and mistake it for an older deer. At 2.5 years old, the juvenile premolars are replaced by permanent premolars and will generally show very little to no wear. At 3.5 and older, aging by tooth wear is subjective. We can generally place them into age classes...middle age, fully mature, or old age. But nailing deer age after 3.5 is a bit of an educated guess.
Cementum annulai is not 100% but its not bad. Its the best method we have.

At 19 months a yearling has the same set of teeth as a 2 year old, with less wear on the premolars. That throws a whole lot of folk off.

 

[chadmyers]

Fore some people it is a waste of time, others not so much.

You are right. I know most of my bucks, so I prefer aging on hoof. If I kill a buck that I Dont know I use cementum annuli. But I still have kept the jawbones of every buck I’ve killed since 2003. These are just my preferences


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[farmhunter]

You want a top view of the teeth to look at the width of the dentine (brown in middle of teeth), for example -

 

[SwampCat]

It can be quite subjective on older deer if you are just handed a picture of a jawbone. But for those of us who are familiar with our deer, it is another tool to confirm our best guess. I know what typical antlers look like at each age. I know what a typical weight would be at each age. I can make an educated guess from looking at the lines of the body. Tooth wear can help confirm what everthing else points towards