For many animals, there are visual clues to how old the animal is. From what I have taken a closer look at, most species with antlers have very distinct differences. The young animals look different from the adult animals. The mature animals also look different from the adult, but in many cases, there are also visual clues if an animal is a new mature, a middle aged mature, or in the last year or two of life.
White-tailed Deer
Mule Deer
Caribou
Roosevelt Elk
Rocky Mountain Elk
Red Deer
You can see that bad lighting made year 11 look more gray than year 12, so this kind of info varies greatly during game play for time of day, weather conditions, and light angles.
Roe Deer
Cape Buffalo
Greater Kudu
Western Moose
Blue Wildebeest
Black Wildebeest
Lion
Other predators and small game, I have not taken too much time on so far. With the wolves, I could not personally notice a difference in them as they aged.
Wolves
Several other species can be difficult to visually age. One that I took a look at was Mountain Goats. Here are photos of a young and a 3 Star mature from a couple perspectives. In addition to size, males seem to have a bit of a bump on the snout that the females do not. Otherwise, I do not notice a change in appearance in ages.
I think the male color differences were due to lighting since the combined picture does not seem to show a difference.
At first, I did get a little excited doing aging for a red fox. Probably wasn’t smart to choose one in Transylvainia, not because of anything negative about the map itself, but the hills and contours make consistent lighting, day to day over years a nightmare. The first run seemed to indicate that red foxes might show visual aging. So then I went and found a second last year mature, and with better lighting, he looked the same as the young fox in the previous effort, so I do not think they have this game feature, but maybe my eyes just aren’t good enough.
