Brown Bears
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50 free Brown Bears trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The brown bear is the most widespread bear on Earth, at home in forests, mountains, tundra and even desert across three continents. It is also one of the most storied animals there is: a soldier's mascot, a city emblem, a fairy-tale prince and an Olympic star, depending on where you look. This quiz turns the best brown bear fun facts into questions. Some cover the animal itself: what it really eats, why it has that shoulder hump, how it fattens up for winter and which rivals it will chase off a carcass. Others travel the world to meet its rarest and largest relatives, and the people who have feared, worshipped and named things after it. It works for curious kids and adults alike, for classroom warm-ups and for trivia nights. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so each question leaves you with a fact worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Brown bears can kill a moose, yet they get up to 90 percent of their food energy from what?
Plants
Plants supply most of a brown bear's calories, from berries and grasses to acorns and pine cones. No other bear has been recorded eating such a variety of foods.
Q 02Which country, home to more than half of the world's brown bears, has by far the largest population of the species?
Russia
Russia has well over 100,000 brown bears, several times the number in the United States or Canada. Fittingly, a bear is the common personification of the nation.
Q 03The extinct Atlas bear, a brown bear named after a mountain range, was the only modern bear native to which continent?
Africa
Africa's only native bear of modern times roamed the Atlas Mountains from Morocco to Libya. Hunters finished it off soon after modern firearms were developed.
Q 04A 2017 DNA test on a mummified relic said to come from which legendary creature showed it was really a brown bear?
Yeti
Yeti stories of the high Himalayas overlap with a local brown bear that Nepalis call Dzu-Teh. The mummified relic tested in 2017 turned out to be one of those bears.
Q 05Which creator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar illustrated the 1967 book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
Eric Carle
Eric Carle was hired after author Bill Martin Jr. saw a lobster he had collaged from tissue paper for a magazine advert. The pair went on to make three sequels.
Q 06Which region is named from an ancient Greek word for 'bear', after the Great Bear constellation of the northern sky?
The Arctic
The Arctic gets its name from arktos, Greek for bear. The same word sits in the brown bear's scientific name, Ursus arctos, which simply says 'bear' twice in two languages.
Q 07Which Nordic country, whose epic poem the Kalevala calls the animal Otso, has the brown bear as its national animal?
Finland
Finland's national animal is the brown bear, the sacred king of the forest in its old folklore. Early Finnish tribes feared and respected it so deeply that its true name was taboo.
Q 08Brown bears in Yellowstone can each eat as many as 40,000 of which insects in a single summer day?
Moths
Moths, specifically army cutworm moths, are so rich in fat that they can supply up to half of a Yellowstone bear's food energy for the whole year.
Q 09The hump on a brown bear's shoulders, found on no other living bear, is solid muscle that powers which activity?
Digging
Digging is what the hump is for: the muscle drives the forelimbs as a bear tears up soil for roots and hollows out its winter den.
Q 10Which Alaskan archipelago's brown bears, cut off since the last ice age, are the largest brown bears in the world?
Kodiak
Kodiak bears are a textbook case of island gigantism: big males average around half a tonne, and the heaviest wild one on record weighed 751 kg (1,656 lb).
Q 11Coastal brown bears in Alaska grow about twice as heavy as inland bears by feasting on which spawning fish?
Salmon
Salmon runs are so rich that at their peak a bear may eat only the eggs and head, leaving the rest of each fish for foxes, eagles and gulls.
Q 12Which animal is the closest living relative of brown bears, so close that the two can produce hybrid cubs in the wild?
Polar bear
Polar bear and brown bear are sister lineages that have swapped genes for hundreds of thousands of years. A hybrid shot in Canada's far north in 2006 proved they still interbreed.
Q 13Misha, a brown bear cub in a belt of Olympic colours, was the mascot of the 1980 Summer Games in which city?
Moscow
Q 21Which US state's official animal is a brown bear subspecies that has not been seen there since 1924?
California
California named the golden bear its state animal in 1953, three decades after the last one was reported. The same bear still strides across the state flag.
Q 22Fat Bear Week, an online vote for the best-fattened brown bear, is run each autumn by which Alaskan national park?
Katmai
Katmai's rangers launched the contest in 2014 as a one-day event called Fat Bear Tuesday. Fans now follow the bears on live webcams at Brooks Falls.
Q 23Apart from other bears, which big cat of eastern Asia is the one predator that adult brown bears have to fear?
Tiger
Tiger and bear are wary rivals: the cats mostly pick off young or small bears, while bears have killed tigresses and their young in fights over prey.
Moscow's Games closed with a giant Misha floating out of the stadium on a cluster of balloons. A mural of the cub in the stands shed a tear as he went.
Q 14Which Swiss city has shown a bear on its coat of arms since the 1220s and has kept live bears for centuries?
Bern
Bern's founder is said to have vowed to name the city after the first animal he met on a hunt, which turned out to be a bear. The city has kept a bear pit since the 16th century.
Q 15Which European capital's coat of arms shows a bear reaching up into a strawberry tree to eat the fruit?
Madrid
Madrid's bear and strawberry tree date back to the Middle Ages. The pair also appear on the badge of the football club Atlético Madrid.
Q 16Which Japanese island, home to thousands of brown bears, was the scene of the country's worst bear attack in 1915?
Hokkaido
Hokkaido was terrorised in December 1915 by a big bear nicknamed Kesagake, which killed seven villagers before a mass hunt brought it down.
Q 17Bruno, a brown bear shot by hunters in 2006, was the first wild bear seen in which country for 170 years?
Germany
Germany had not recorded a wild bear since 1838 when Bruno wandered north across the Alps. Bavaria's leader branded him a 'problem bear' before he was shot.
Q 18Brown bears in Yellowstone routinely drive which pack-hunting predators off their fresh kills and take the carcass?
Wolves
Wolves lose kills to bears so regularly that Yellowstone researchers treat a visit from a bear as a certainty. Most of these stand-offs end without bloodshed on either side.
Q 19North America's inland brown bears go by which name, a reference to the pale tips on their dark fur?
Grizzly
Grizzly comes from 'grizzled': the hairs on the back are dark at the base and whitish at the tip. Coastal bears of the same subspecies are usually just called brown bears.
Q 20Which old nickname for a brown bear comes from the bear character in the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox?
Bruin
Bruin comes from the Middle Dutch word for 'brown'. William Caxton's English translation of the fable carried the name into the language.
Q 24The Gobi bear, a desert-dwelling brown bear and one of the rarest bears on Earth, survives only in which country?
Mongolia
Mongolia knows it as the Mazaalai. Since 1985 feed pellets have been left at desert waterholes each spring and autumn to help the last few dozen through lean months.
Q 25The Marsican brown bear, a rare and unusually calm population, lives only in the Apennine mountains of which country?
Italy
Italy's Marsican bears are the symbol of the Abruzzo national park, where a traditional local loaf, pan dell'orso, is named 'bear bread' after them.
Q 26Scientists once watched a wild brown bear pick up a barnacle-covered rock and use it as a tool for what?
Scratching itself
Scratching itself with the rock, the bear gave researchers their one recorded case of tool use by the species. Brown bears have one of the largest brains for their size of any carnivore.
Q 27Brown bears are usually busiest around dawn and dusk, but those living close to people shift most activity to when?
At night
Bears near towns and roads move mostly at night, a switch that keeps them out of people's way. Where humans are scarce, youngsters are often out all day.
Q 28Which ancient people used brown bears to execute criminals and sent them into arenas to fight other animals?
Romans
Romans staged the fights before thousands of spectators, and gladiators were also sent in against bears in duels to the death.
Q 29Which Scandinavian man's name, made famous worldwide by a Swedish tennis champion, is simply the word for 'bear'?
Björn
Björn means 'bear', and tennis great Björn Borg carried the name around the world. In Sweden a Björn is often nicknamed Nalle, which means 'teddy bear'.
Q 30Which Indigenous people hand-raised a brown bear cub for iomante, a ceremony meant to send its spirit back to the gods?
Ainu
Ainu villagers raised the cub almost like a child, at first indoors, before the ceremony returned its soul to the god-world. Its meat and pelt were seen as the bear's parting gift.