Antelope
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Antelope trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Antelopes are far more varied than the slender, leaping animal most people picture. The name covers dozens of kinds, from giants heavier than a dairy cow to miniatures you could tuck under one arm, and they have settled in deserts, marshes, mountains and frozen plains as well as open grassland. This quiz turns the best antelope fun facts into questions: what their headgear is made of, how they see, feed and get away from hunters, which kinds hold the records, and which ones came back from the brink. Other questions follow antelopes into car showrooms, coin collections, cartoon films, folklore and national emblems. It suits wildlife fans, safari dreamers, students and teachers, and anyone who enjoys a good animal fact. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing far more about antelopes than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which antelope stampedes through a gorge in Disney's The Lion King, in the scene where Mufasa is killed?
Wildebeest
Wildebeest herds make a believable stampede: they are the most abundant big-game animals in East Africa. Disney's animators built a few of them in 3D and multiplied them into hundreds.
Q 02Which antelope, the national animal of South Africa, appears on the reverse of every Krugerrand gold coin?
Springbok
Springbok comes from the Afrikaans words for jump and buck, and the coin shows the animal in mid-leap. South Africa's national rugby team plays under the same name.
Q 03Which graceful African antelope, able to leap three metres into the air, gave its name to a classic Chevrolet?
Impala
Impala became a Chevrolet model for 1958, with the leaping antelope as the car's logo. The real animal can cover 10 metres in a single bound.
Q 04Antelope horns have a bony core covered by a sheath of which protein, also found in human fingernails?
Keratin
Keratin keeps growing over the bone and is never shed. That is the big difference from a deer's antlers, which are bare bone and fall off to be regrown every year.
Q 05Which North American animal is nicknamed the American antelope, although it belongs to a separate family of its own?
Pronghorn
Pronghorn only look like antelopes because they evolved to fill the same role on open plains. Their closest living relatives are the giraffe and the okapi.
Q 06Which sportswear brand, founded in England, takes its name from the Afrikaans word for a South African antelope?
Reebok
Reebok is the Afrikaans name of the grey rhebok. The company's founders, two brothers from Bolton, found the word in a dictionary that one of them had won in a boyhood sprint race.
Q 07Which mythical rabbit, popularised by a Wyoming taxidermist in the 1930s, is said to wear the horns of an antelope?
Jackalope
Jackalope is a blend of the words jackrabbit and antelope. Douglas Herrick and his brother made the first one by grafting deer antlers onto a jackrabbit, then sold it to a hotel for ten dollars.
Q 08Which tiny African antelope, barely knee-high to a human, is named after the alarm call its females make?
Dik-dik
Dik-dik pairs are monogamous and may share one territory for life. Staying put may be the safer choice for an animal that small, since wandering off to find a new partner means meeting predators.
Q 09Home on the Range, the cowboy song that mentions antelope, is the official state song of which US state?
Kansas
Kansas adopted the song in 1947. Its words began as a poem written in the early 1870s by Brewster Higley, a homesteader living in a cabin in Smith County.
Q 10In the South African sport of bokdrol spoeg, contestants spit pellets of which antelope's dung as far as possible?
Kudu
Kudu droppings are small, hard pellets, which makes them the ammunition of choice. The pastime became a formal sport in 1994 and now has an annual world championship.
Q 11Which huge, ox-like African antelope did Dutch settlers at the Cape name after the moose of northern Europe?
Eland
Eland is simply the Dutch word for elk, the European name for the moose. The giant eland is the largest antelope species in the world, yet elands can jump 2.5 metres from a standing start.
Q 12The royal antelope, a shy forest dweller of West Africa, holds which record among the world's antelopes?
Smallest species
Smallest species by some distance: a royal antelope stands only about 25 cm at the shoulder. Its grand name comes from a Dutch merchant's report that locals called it the king of the harts.
Q 13Which long-necked East African antelope stands upright on its hind legs to browse leaves over two metres up?
Gerenuk
Q 21Antelopes belong to which family of cloven-hoofed mammals, the same one that includes cattle, sheep and goats?
Bovidae
Bovidae holds them all, and 'antelope' is just the label for any member that is not a sheep, a goat or one of the cattle. Some antelopes are therefore closer kin to cows than to other antelopes.
Q 22What name is given to the partly digested food that antelopes, like cows, bring back up to chew a second time?
Cud
Cud comes back up as soft balls of stored food, which an antelope's well-developed molars grind to a pulp before it is swallowed again for further digestion.
Q 23Antelopes have no upper front teeth, so their lower incisors bite grass against which structure instead?
A gum pad
Gerenuk is taken from the animal's Somali name. Its stretched neck earned it a second name, the giraffe gazelle, and lets it reach food that other antelopes of its size cannot.
Q 14Which antelope of the Central Asian steppe has a swollen, drooping nose and ranged as far as Britain in the Ice Age?
Saiga
Saiga once roamed the mammoth steppe from the British Isles to Beringia. Today the vast majority of the world's saigas live in Kazakhstan.
Q 15Which white desert antelope was extinct in the wild by the early 1970s, then successfully returned from zoo-bred herds?
Arabian oryx
Arabian oryx were released back into the wild from 1980. In 2011 the species became the first ever to climb from Extinct in the Wild to Vulnerable on the Red List.
Q 16Which animal, the largest antelope in Asia, has a Hindi name that translates as blue cow?
Nilgai
Nilgai joins the Hindi words nil, blue, and gai, cow, though only the adult bulls turn bluish grey. Animals released on a Texas ranch in the 1920s founded feral herds that still roam there.
Q 17Which Indian antelope with long corkscrew horns is the only living member of the genus Antilope?
Blackbuck
Blackbuck horns can spiral to 75 cm on a male, and females occasionally grow a pair too. The species now also thrives on ranches in Texas and Argentina, where it was introduced for hunting.
Q 18Which swamp-dwelling African antelope has long, splayed hooves and a shaggy, water-repellent coat for life in marshes?
Sitatunga
Sitatunga are so tied to wetlands that their other common name is marshbuck. Only the males grow horns, and the body and legs are specially adapted to boggy ground.
Q 19Which chestnut-red forest antelope with thin white stripes shares its name with a pair of small hand drums?
Bongo
Bongo are among the largest of the forest antelopes and are mostly active at night. Males and females alike carry the heavy, spiralled horns.
Q 20Which South African antelope, hunted out by about 1800, was the first large African mammal recorded to go extinct?
Bluebuck
Bluebuck skins survive as just four mounted specimens, in museums in Leiden, Stockholm, Vienna and Paris. So few accounts were written while it lived that even early drawings seem to be copied from stuffed specimens.
A gum pad, hard and toothless, lines the front of the upper jaw. The lower incisors press against it to tear off grass stems and leaves.
Q 24Antelope eyes sit on the sides of the head and have pupils of which shape, widening the view of approaching danger?
Horizontal bars
Horizontal bars of pupil give an antelope a broad sweep of vision with very little overlap between the two eyes. Sharp hearing and smell take over at night, when most predators are on the prowl.
Q 25Africa is home to dozens of antelope species but only one native deer, known by which name?
Barbary stag
Barbary stag, a red deer of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, is the lone exception. Deer and antelopes fill much the same niche, the likely reason that where one group thrives the other is scarce.
Q 26Which African birds ride on antelopes and other large mammals, feeding on the ticks in their hides?
Oxpeckers
Oxpeckers are not purely helpful passengers. They also feed on blood and flesh from their hosts' wounds, so a partnership once thought to suit both sides can tip into parasitism.
Q 27Which term describes the stiff-legged leaps, with all four feet off the ground, that gazelles make near predators?
Stotting
Stotting is most likely an honest signal: the leaping animal shows a predator that it would be hard to catch. Both sides gain, because neither wastes energy on a chase that would fail.
Q 28The chousingha of India and Nepal is unique among antelopes for having which feature?
Four horns
Four horns is exactly what chousingha means in Hindi. The longer pair sits between the ears and a shorter pair grows on the forehead, sometimes as little more than fur-covered studs.
Q 29The giant sable antelope, feared lost during a long civil war, is the national symbol of which African country?
Angola
Angola prints the animal on its banknotes, stamps and passports. It is also the emblem of the national airline, and the national football team is nicknamed the Palancas Negras after it.
Q 30The gemsbok, a desert antelope with long, straight horns, supports the shield on the coat of arms of which country?
Namibia
Namibia based the shield on its national flag, then added an African fish eagle as the crest and two gemsbok as supporters, one standing on either side.