Jawbone experts, this is jawbone from the fat old 5 point I killed, I'm saying 6 to 7, what do you think?

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Voting 6.5

Agree

At least 6

6

thanks

I think you are correct. Once they get over 4.5, gets hard to decipher for me between years

he been chewing for a while ...

Looks like a 6 year old to me

I just did a skull mount on a 90" 8pt from Baldwin County. Jawbones look exactly like these. I figured it was 5.5. I have seen a lot of jawbones from this particular area.

http://www.buckmanager.com/2007/01/19/age-determination-using-jaw-bones/

I'd say 5.5, due to the dentine being 2x as wide as the enamel on teeth 4 and 5, but only slightly wider on tooth 6. Also, the #4 tooth in turkeymaster's pics, to me, do not look worn completely smooth.

where I won't disagree with you because I really don't know how old the deer was, but the teeth wear can vary from place to place due to habitat

Turkeymaster you are correct deer at my house in dang near beach sand seem to wear different from those at my other place that's mainly prairie dirt. You can really see a difference in very old 6+ year old deer that are the same age sometimes. Looking at that jaw bone and if that deer was killed at my house I'd also say he is probably 5 just from the pics and looking at it on a my phone at a glance. He is more than likely 6 but a good point was brought up.

True, Turkeymaster. No argument from me there.

Dang Matt let everybody guess before you come in a spoil it. Once you comment it turns in to flipping repeat.

only way to accurately age deer by tooth wear is to have a bunch of jawbones off the same piece of land, sorted to age classes and compare.

Troy,
Is that because they would all be eating more or less the same diet, which would have similar wear effect on the deer's teeth?

I'll answer for Troy and that's a yes. Perfect example is my 2 places one is mainly sand and is not growing the native legumes that naturally grow on my other place in the prairie dirt. So the deer resort to eating things on one place that they don't have on the other. Like ladino clover it's everywhere and so is vetch and so on. Basically just let the sun hit the ground on prairie soil once non native grass is controlled and a legume is going to grow. At my house in the sand I hope for green briar and crap like that it's just different and so are there diets and over several years so is tooth wear. Not to mention my neighbors at the house are masterbaiters so corn is a big part of there diet along with the sand situation and I guess that causes a little more tooth wear.

Out of over 7,000 jawbones collected over a decade on king ranch, known age deer, professional biologist were +/- 1 year of actual age 70% of the time. The discrepancy was not because the biologists didn’t know how to age deer, but rather due to variations in toothwear from varying diets and genetic factors. I’d say at best, on wild deer, even from a place that you’re familiar with, looking at toothwear alone, that any biologist is right 50% of the time. That’s why I like to look at other data and years worth of pictures. We’ve killed some deer we knew to be at least 5 that aged 3, and overall deer in the parts of the state I work typically age with less wear than what I was trained to see at specific ages.

Sandy soil does accelerate toothwear.