Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Help aging this old bull

My wife shot this Nevada bull last fall. It was a great hunt and her bull had a lot of character - 1 eye, 2 old broken ribs that had healed over, and a tine stuck in its forehead and scarred over. It’s the only wild animal I’ve ever seen with gray hair and based on its teeth, it looks really old. It only had one ivory left and it was worn flat to the gun line. A taxidermist told us it was the oldest elk they had ever seen, and estimated the age at over 10 years, and possibly 15. I’m just trying to get more opinions.

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Solid old warrior of a bull. from what I understand the older they are the harder it becomes to tell by simply looking at the teeth. If you still have the teeth, pull one and send it off.

https://deerage.com/

Yes. Pull a front tooth and send it to your Moose&Goose folks.

Guessing 12-14 years, based on tooth wear. However, tooth wear varies from place to place depending on what they eat and the amount of grit that is present on staple food items. As others have said, sectioning and staining an incisor, then counting the annular rings is the most accurate way to determine the age of wild ungulates.

Great to see a wild elk get that old! Would be very interesting to hear from a tooth-section exactly how old it was.

For an old bull his antlers are not disfigured. Around here, old declining bull elk can have an interesting rack O' horns. Congrats

Mudhen, can you explain in more detail how to do this? Which way do I cut the tooth? Which way do the rings run?

The pictures don’t really do his rack justice. He has a ton of mass. His crowns are huge. His 4s were only 12 1/2” and 11”, but his 3rds and fronts were all between 16” and a little over 18”. I think he was either shrinking due to his age or his injuries taking a toll on him. Overall he’s a really cool bull.

Something else that comes to mind since we are eating some of this guy this evening is how mild and tender this old bull is. I killed an average bull last year and it’s meat is both much tougher and has a sligh onion essence oddly enough.

Unfortunately, it is a pretty complicated process. You have to decalcify the whole tooth, let it firm up, and then cut very thin sections with a special tool. After that, the sections have to be soaked in a solution to stain them so that the annular rings can be seen. The stained sections are mounted on a glass slide and returned to you (or whoever is going to read them). Then you have to examine the stained sections under a microscope and count the annular rings.

Not many people do this themselves, as there are folks around that do this (along with other specialized procedures) for a living. The best way to get it done is to take it to your state wildlife agency. Some of them have someone on staff that can do this, but most of them send the teeth off to specialists and get stained sections back to read.

Thanks mudhen

Kind of bittersweet to kill an old warrior (an apt term used by a previous poster) like that. No doubt you thanked the hunting gods for sending him your way. All animals deserve a swift and painless death. Few get it. I presume he did.