A biological system to measure time
There are lots of biological clocks, or clocks made of biological components. The circadian clock is an important, though complicated, example. There are excellent engineered clocks that form some of the neatest examples of systems / synthetic biology. See for example Elowitz &amp; Leibler's "repressilator" (link, link). The basic idea in all of these is to have gene regulatory circuits with feedback that lead to oscillation of the gene expression dynamics. Books on systems biology, or Philip Nelson's Physical Models of Living Systems (aimed at physicists), are good places to read more.