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Accurately estimating the age of wildlife is important for wildlife management, tracking pop-ulations, and trophy evaluation. In cervids, age is traditionally estimated from dental and morphological traits, but these approaches may be influenced by the examiner’s experience. Age-associated changes in DNA methylation provide the basis for epigenetic clocks and offer a potential molecular approach to age estimation. However, DNA methylation patterns are tissue-specific, and it is still unclear how well these methods work in antler tissue.

To investigate the potential of antlers for epigenetic age estimation, we extracted DNA from 12 mature antler samples from five red deer (Cervus elaphus) with known ages. Using the HorvathMammalMethylChip40 array, DNA methylation across the genome, covering about 37,000 CpG sites, was analyzed. After quality control and processing, we tested 103 existing epigenetic clocks and compared their age estimates to actual ages using Pearson's correlation coefficient.

DNA of sufficient quantity and quality for methylation analysis was obtained from all the antler samples. Several existing epigenetic clocks showed significant positive correlations with chronological age. Among the clocks, DNAmAgeMuscleFinal had the strongest corre-lation with age (R = 0.80, p = 0.0018), closely followed by Universal BloodClock3 (R = 0.79, p = 0.0021). In contrast, the cervid-specific clocks like DNAmAge Elk&Deer showed only a moderate, non-significant correlation (R = 0.48, p = 0.11), while DNAmAgeCoef.RoeDeerBlood clock showed no relationship with age (R = -0.023, p = 0.94).

These preliminary results show that DNA from red deer antlers can be used for genome-wide DNA methylation analysis and contain age-related epigenetic information. Our findings suggest that tissue specificity may be an important factor when applying epigenetic age pre-dictors to antler-derived DNA. Although the current dataset is too limited for reliable indi-vidual age prediction, the observed correlations support further investigation using a larger number of individuals across a broader age range. Such data could enable the development and validation of an antler-specific epigenetic clock as a complementary molecular tool for red deer age estimation.