Carl Linnaeus Trivia
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58 free Carl Linnaeus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Carl Linnaeus is the reason a lion is Panthera leo and you are Homo sapiens. This Carl Linnaeus trivia quiz covers his whole life: the curate's son from Småland who nearly became a cobbler's apprentice, the second-year student lecturing to crowds of 300, the six-month trek through Lapland, and the two books (Systema Naturae and Species Plantarum) that still mark the starting points of zoological and botanical naming. You will also meet the stranger corners of his story: the seven-headed hydra he exposed as a fake in Hamburg, the temperature scale he flipped upside down, the coat of arms with an egg on it, and the 17 'apostles' he sent around the world while never leaving Sweden again himself. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer is verified against and cited to the relevant reference page, so you can trust what you learn. If you enjoy this one, try our other science and history quizzes.
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Q 01In which language did Linnaeus write the scientific names he gave to plants and animals?
Latin
Latin was the shared language of Europe's scholars in the 1700s, and Linnaeus wrote many of his own books in it; the names still take Latin form even when built from Greek words or a person's surname.
Q 02Which naming system did Linnaeus formalise for organisms?
Binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature replaced unwieldy descriptive phrases: the briar rose, once labelled with a whole string of words, became simply Rosa canina. Others had tried two-word names before, but he was the first to use them consistently.
Q 03Linnaeus is popularly known as the father of which discipline?
Modern taxonomy
Modern taxonomy still runs on his nested ranks, from kingdom down to species, though later biologists slotted in extra levels such as phylum and family that his scheme did not have.
Q 04What name did Linnaeus take after his ennoblement in 1761?
Carl von Linné
Carl von Linné was the style granted by a patent of nobility issued in 1761 but backdated to 1757, the year the king had first awarded him the honour.
Q 05What abbreviation marks Linnaeus as the authority for a plant name?
L.
L. after a plant name, as in Rubus L. for the brambles, records that Linnaeus was the first to publish it; zoologists cite him differently, usually writing his surname out in full.
Q 06What was the profession of Linnaeus's father, Nils?
Lutheran curate
A Lutheran curate and keen gardener, Nils gave Carl a plot of his own by the age of five. The family expected another clergyman and was disappointed when the boy showed no taste for the priesthood.
Q 07The family surname Linnæus honours which kind of plant?
A lime (linden)
A lime (linden), lind in the family's own tongue, stood huge on their farm, and Nils made a scholar's surname of it when he went off to study for the church. An uncle had already taken the name Tiliander from the same tree.
Q 08Linnaeus's teachers advised his father to apprentice the plant-mad schoolboy to a tailor or to which other trade?
Cobbler
Cobbler or tailor, they said in 1726, judging him unfit for a learned education. A local physician changed his father's mind by predicting the boy would distinguish himself in medicine.
Q 09At which university did Linnaeus first enrol, in 1727?
Lund
Lund held him for a single year, in which the physician Kilian Stobæus took him into his home and encouraged his natural history. In 1728 he transferred to Uppsala, where he spent most of his career.
Q 10Which flower did Linnaeus name after the Uppsala professor who let him lecture as a student?
Rudbeckia
Rudbeckia, the black-eyed Susans, honours Olof Rudbeck the Younger and his father. Rudbeck chose the second-year student to give his botany lectures in 1730, then took him in as tutor to his children.
Q 11Linnaeus sorted flowering plants into classes and orders by which feature?
Number of stamens and pistils
Number of stamens and pistils fixed each plant's class and order. One critic, Johann Siegesbeck, called this 'sexual system' loathsome harlotry, and Linnaeus gave his name to a small weed.
Q 12Which region did the young Linnaeus explore on horseback and on foot in the summer of 1732?
Lapland
Lapland became his calling card: he took a Sami costume and drum to Holland, wore them in the homes of scholars, and posed in the outfit for a full-length portrait.
Q 13Which small woodland plant was Linnaeus's favourite and now carries his name as Linnaea borealis?
Twinflower
Q 21About how many pages long was the first edition of Systema Naturae, printed in 1735?
12
12 by one count, 11 or 14 by others: huge folio pages that set out his whole scheme of nature in tables. As specimens arrived from every corner of the globe, it swelled into a work of several volumes.
Q 22Which tropical plant flowered at George Clifford's Dutch estate in 1736, while Linnaeus was in charge of the garden?
Banana
Banana, then known as the plantain tree, bloomed at the banker's Hartekamp estate, and Linnaeus devoted a whole book to the event, Musa Cliffortiana.
Q 23Which garden did Linnaeus visit on his 1736 trip to England to meet its keeper, Philip Miller?
Chelsea Physic Garden
Twinflower was named Linnaea in his honour by the Dutch botanist Gronovius, and he made it his emblem: he holds a sprig in the portraits printed in his books, and it forms the crest of his arms.
Q 14Which naturalist's grandfather turned Linnaeus's plant system into a popular poem, 'The Loves of the Plants'?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, a physician, had already helped translate Linnaeus into English with his Lichfield botanical society before he put the system into verse in 1789.
Q 15What struck Uppsala in 1766, prompting Linnaeus to build a stone museum for his collections at Hammarby?
A great fire
A great fire destroyed about a third of Uppsala, so Linnaeus moved his plants and books out of town to a small stone building on the hill behind his summer farm.
Q 16On his way to the Netherlands in 1735, in which city did Linnaeus expose a famous seven-headed hydra as a fake?
Hamburg
Hamburg's prized hydra was weasel jawbones dressed in snakeskin, Linnaeus announced, and the fuss was such that a friendly doctor advised him to leave town at once.
Q 17Before moving on to Leiden in 1735, Linnaeus collected a quick medical doctorate at which small Dutch university?
Harderwijk
Harderwijk was the fast, cheap choice for students who had to take their doctorates abroad: Linnaeus arrived with his thesis already written and was examined and graduated within about a week.
Q 18Which disease did Linnaeus's doctoral thesis wrongly blame on clay?
Malaria
Malaria, then called ague, was caused by clay, he argued in a thesis he brought to his examiners already written. The real carrier, the mosquito, was only identified in 1897.
Q 19How did Linnaeus's friend Peter Artedi die in 1735?
Drowned in an Amsterdam canal
Drowned in an Amsterdam canal while walking home at night, Artedi left his life's work in manuscript. Linnaeus, true to a pact the two had made as students, edited and published it in 1738.
Q 20In the first edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus placed whales in which class?
Fish
Fish was the usual view at the time, and Linnaeus followed his friend Peter Artedi, the pioneer of fish classification. Only in 1758 did he take whales out of the class.
Chelsea Physic Garden's keeper sent him back to Holland with rare plants for his patron's collection, one prize of a summer trip that also took him to Oxford.
Q 24Which genus of tropical pitcher plants did Linnaeus name after the grief-banishing drug in Homer's Odyssey?
Nepenthes
Nepenthes, 'without grief', is what Helen slips into the wine in the Odyssey. Linnaeus borrowed the word in 1737 for a pitcher plant in his catalogue of George Clifford's garden.
Q 25Heading home in 1738, never to leave Sweden again, Linnaeus stopped to visit botanists in which country?
France
France: in Paris he called on the Jussieu brothers, botanists at the royal garden, before sailing home from Rouen. From then on the wider world came to him, in the specimens his students shipped back from their voyages.
Q 26Which learned society did Linnaeus help found in 1739, serving as its first president?
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences founders drew lots for the chair and Linnaeus won, presiding for its first quarter. The first paper in its proceedings was his too, on the art of gardening.
Q 27In which copper-mining town did Linnaeus court and marry Sara Elisabeth Moræa, the local physician's daughter?
Falun
Falun's physician agreed to the match in 1735 but the penniless student had to wait: the wedding came in June 1739, once a salaried post in Stockholm gave him an income.
Q 28Which temperature scale is Linnaeus credited with turning upside down into its modern form?
Celsius
Celsius set his scale in 1742 with water boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Linnaeus had it reversed for a thermometer in his greenhouses soon after the astronomer's death, as others did independently.
Q 29Which relative did Linnaeus arrange to succeed him in his professor's chair at Uppsala?
His son
His son Carl was groomed as successor from 1763 and took over the chair in 1777. He died six years later without heirs, and his mother sold the great collections abroad.
Q 30Linnaeus's pupil Daniel Solander sailed round the world as a naturalist from 1768 under which explorer?
James Cook
James Cook's naturalists included Solander because he was already on the spot: Linnaeus had sent him to England in 1760 to spread the new system, and he stayed on at the British Museum.