show Abstracthide AbstractAdversity experienced in early life can cause permament changes in individual phenotypes through epigenetic modification, such as DNA methylation. There is particularly a growing interest how prenatal conditions can exert developing stress on phenotypes. In this project, we utilised blood samples from a natural population of European badgers (Meles meles) studied systemtically at Wytham Woods for more than 30 years and analysed methylation patterns in ~4-month-old 95 individuals between 2003 and 2011 using reduced representation bisulfite sequencing.