“…The development of molecular age biomarkers, or measurable changes in DNA or RNA abundance or sequence change with time, provides a new way to estimate chronological age (Jarman et al, 2015). Such tools could be validated using both knownage animals from long-term study sites and from stranded animals aged using skeletal materials or natural chemical markers (Polanowski et al, 2014;Laptikhovsky et al, 2018).…”