Guys,
I took the jaw bone from the deer I shot this year to a good friend of mine to see what he thought it's age was. This guy is more experienced than I am when it comes to old deer. He has hunted the same area that I am since the seventies. He has also taken a lot of P&Y bucks and a couple of B&C non-typicals. In short, I believe that he knows what he's talking about.
Based on him seeing the deer and the jaw bone, he came up with 8 1/2 like I did. When we age a deer, we look at many different things. Antler mass, shape and size along with body size andshape, foot wear. One more thing we've been looking at is the thickness of the skull plates. The thinking is that as the buck gets older, his skull plate thickens. This one is over 3/8" thick. Any thoughts on this? This does not imply that we are 100% accurate, but I think we are in the ball park. Another thing to take into consideration is the location and available food sources for the deer. Where this buck lived the soil and food are not as harsh on the teeth as a sandy soiled or total browse location.
The pics are not as good as I thought. They leave out a lot of 3-d detail. Maybe I'll try again.
First a 6 1/2 year old
His jaw bone
Another
8 1/2 year old
Jaw bone
Another
Can you see the difference?
Here's a pic of the front teeth. These really start to wear down as the deer ages. Older one is on the right, the teeth are a lot smaller.
Here's a pic of where the jaw was broken.
While these are my best guesstimates, I'm going to look into sending in the teeth for a X-section analysis.
What do you guys think?