BuzzH
Well-known member
WyoDoug,
Hijacked from the Wyoming Game and Fish...
While hunting pronghorn antelope in Wyoming many hunters will stop at a game check station. At these check stations, you will often find more than one WGFD employee at the tailgate of a parked truck, huddled around harvested animals and their hunting party. Usually, one biologist will examine each animal while hollering out numbers to the other biologist, who will record the information onto a piece of paper, tablet, or smart phone. More often than not, when hunters hear “this pronghorn is two years old,” looks of skepticism immediately follow. Next, the hunter will usually ask the biologist how they know how old their antelope is and the biologist will explain the process for aging an antelope.
If you pull down the front lip of a pronghorn and look at the front teeth, the incisors, the first thing you’ll notice is that they only have lower front teeth. As you move from the front of the jaw to the back, you will see four front teeth on either side of the jaw (eight total) followed by a toothless gap before the start of the pre-molars and molars. You only need to examine the tooth replacement pattern of the incisors to estimate the field age of a pronghorn.
You can easily recognize a fawn antelope because of their smaller size, shorter face profile, and the presence of all eight deciduous incisors (also known as baby teeth or milk teeth).
Each year, one of the deciduous incisors on each side of the jaw will be replaced by a permanent adult tooth. This replacement starts with the front two teeth. So a yearling pronghorn will have two permanent adult front incisors followed by three deciduous incisors on each side.
By the next year’s hunting season, that same pronghorn will be approximately two years old and the second deciduous incisors will have been replaced by two more permanent adult teeth.
During the pronghorn’s third year, the third incisors are replaced.
By the time the pronghorn is a four year old, the fourth permanent incisors, which are actually the canines even though they look like incisors, will have erupted. At this point all of the eight incisors will be permanent adult teeth and all a biologist can determine in the field is the pronghorn is at least four years old. To determine an accurate age for antelope four years old and older, biologists can extract and send the middle two incisors to a lab for aging. There are some variations to incisor replacement as teeth do not always replace at the same time.
Hijacked from the Wyoming Game and Fish...
While hunting pronghorn antelope in Wyoming many hunters will stop at a game check station. At these check stations, you will often find more than one WGFD employee at the tailgate of a parked truck, huddled around harvested animals and their hunting party. Usually, one biologist will examine each animal while hollering out numbers to the other biologist, who will record the information onto a piece of paper, tablet, or smart phone. More often than not, when hunters hear “this pronghorn is two years old,” looks of skepticism immediately follow. Next, the hunter will usually ask the biologist how they know how old their antelope is and the biologist will explain the process for aging an antelope.
If you pull down the front lip of a pronghorn and look at the front teeth, the incisors, the first thing you’ll notice is that they only have lower front teeth. As you move from the front of the jaw to the back, you will see four front teeth on either side of the jaw (eight total) followed by a toothless gap before the start of the pre-molars and molars. You only need to examine the tooth replacement pattern of the incisors to estimate the field age of a pronghorn.
You can easily recognize a fawn antelope because of their smaller size, shorter face profile, and the presence of all eight deciduous incisors (also known as baby teeth or milk teeth).
Each year, one of the deciduous incisors on each side of the jaw will be replaced by a permanent adult tooth. This replacement starts with the front two teeth. So a yearling pronghorn will have two permanent adult front incisors followed by three deciduous incisors on each side.
By the next year’s hunting season, that same pronghorn will be approximately two years old and the second deciduous incisors will have been replaced by two more permanent adult teeth.
During the pronghorn’s third year, the third incisors are replaced.
By the time the pronghorn is a four year old, the fourth permanent incisors, which are actually the canines even though they look like incisors, will have erupted. At this point all of the eight incisors will be permanent adult teeth and all a biologist can determine in the field is the pronghorn is at least four years old. To determine an accurate age for antelope four years old and older, biologists can extract and send the middle two incisors to a lab for aging. There are some variations to incisor replacement as teeth do not always replace at the same time.
