60 free Caves trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Caves are where the oldest art, the strangest animals and some of the biggest empty spaces on Earth are hiding. This quiz goes underground on every continent. It starts with the basics: the rock that most caves are dissolved from, the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, the word for cave formations in general, and the science that studies all of it. Then the record-breakers, from Kentucky's Mammoth Cave and Vietnam's Sơn Đoòng to the Sarawak Chamber, the Miao Room and the two shafts in the Caucasus that go down more than two kilometres. The living caves follow: 20 million bats pouring out of a Texas sinkhole, glowworms in New Zealand, the olm that can fast for a decade, cave bears and troglobites, and a Romanian cave whose entire food chain runs on chemistry rather than sunlight. Human caves too: Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet, the Denisovans and Homo naledi, Derinkuyu's underground city, the Cave of Hira and the Cave of the Apocalypse, cheese ageing at Wookey Hole, and the 2018 rescue at Tham Luang. Easy questions suit anyone who has taken a show-cave tour; the expert tier reaches Qaqa Mach'ay, Sof Omar and the farmers who drained five ponds at Longyou. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the caves, formations and creatures involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For single sites, our Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, Wind Cave and cave paintings pages go deeper.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Most of the world's caves are formed by the slow dissolving of which rock?
Limestone
Rainwater charged with carbonic acid eats along cracks and bedding planes; the resulting sinkhole-pocked landscape is called karst.
Q 02What is the name for the scientific study of caves?
Speleology
Recreational exploration is caving, potholing or spelunking; the science's name was coined by Émile Rivière in 1890.
Q 03A stalactite hangs from a cave ceiling. What is the matching formation that grows up from the floor called?
Stalagmite
An easy memory aid: stalactites hold tight to the ceiling, stalagmites might reach it one day.
Q 04Which system in Kentucky has the greatest total length of surveyed passage in the world?
Mammoth Cave
More than 675 kilometres have been mapped, over one and a half times the length of the runner-up, an underwater system in Mexico.
Q 05In which country is Sơn Đoòng, the cave with the largest known passage in the world?
Vietnam
A local man found the entrance in 1990 while looking for agarwood, but was put off by the wind and roar of water and did not go back for years.
Q 06Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, is the summer home of the largest colony of which animals on Earth?
Mexican free-tailed bats
An estimated 20 million of them roost there from March to October, the largest known concentration of mammals anywhere.
Q 07Waitomo Cave in New Zealand is famous for a ceiling lit by thousands of what?
Glowworms
They are the larvae of a fungus gnat found only in New Zealand, dangling sticky silk threads to snare prey drawn to the light.
Q 08What are cave visitors told to do to enter the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri?
Lie flat in a small rowboat
The entrance is about a metre high at low tide; the Emperor Tiberius used the cave as his private swimming hole.
Q 09In 2018, twelve boys and their football coach were trapped for over two weeks in the Tham Luang cave in which country?
Thailand
Two divers from the UK found the Wild Boars team alive on a ledge two kilometres inside; all thirteen were sedated and dived out between 8 and 10 July.
Q 10The Paleolithic paintings of Lascaux, with its Hall of the Bulls, are in which country?
France
An 18-year-old found the entrance in 1940 when his dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree; the original cave has been closed since 1963.
Q 11Which site in the Altai Mountains of Siberia gave its name to an extinct human species identified from a finger bone in 2010?
Denisova Cave
The site also yielded a 50,000-year-old bone needle and a girl whose mother was Neanderthal and father Denisovan.
Q 12Fingal's Cave, whose echoes inspired Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, is a sea cave on which Scottish island?
Staffa
It is built of hexagonal basalt columns like the Giant's Causeway; Turner painted it and Jules Verne wrote it into The Green Ray.
Q 13Cave-dwelling animals such as blind fish and pale salamanders that cannot live outside caves are called what?
Troglobites
Q 21The Sarawak Chamber, the largest cave room by area, lies in Gunung Mulu National Park on which island?
Borneo
Three visiting cavers found it in 1981 and reckoned it three times the size of Carlsbad's Big Room, then thought the world's largest.
Q 22Which painted site in the Ardèche, discovered in 1994 and decorated around 32,000 years ago, is the subject of Werner Herzog's 3D film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"?
Chauvet
Herzog got six four-hour shooting days from the French culture ministry; the public is never admitted.
Q 23Cueva de las Manos, a UNESCO site covered in stencilled hands up to 9,000 years old, is in which country?
Argentina
The artists sprayed paint through bone pipes; radiocarbon dates on those pipes helped date the work.
Species that merely visit, such as bats that feed outside, are trogloxenes; those that can live in or out are troglophiles.
Q 14Which blind, pale European cave salamander, nicknamed the "human fish", can survive up to ten years without eating?
The olm
Locals once took the creatures washed out by floods for a dragon's offspring; an average adult lives about 68 years.
Q 15The Cave of Altamira, the first cave whose paintings were recognised as prehistoric, is in which country?
Spain
The bison on its Polychrome Ceiling now form the tourism logo of Cantabria; the man who publicised them was accused of forgery.
Q 16The word "karst", for landscapes of sinkholes and underground drainage, is associated with a plateau in which country?
Slovenia
Postojna Cave there has run a tourist train since 1872 and only 5 of its 24 kilometres are open to the public.
Q 17What are the mineral formations inside caves, from stalactites to flowstone, collectively called?
Speleothems
Almost all are calcite or aragonite; their growth layers can be read like tree rings as records of past climate.
Q 18Lechuguilla Cave and Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico were carved from below by what, formed from gas rising off oil deposits?
Sulfuric acid
Most caves are dissolved from above by rainwater; here hydrogen sulfide mixed with groundwater and ate upward.
Q 19Kazumura Cave on the slopes of Kīlauea in Hawaii is the world's longest and deepest example of what kind of cave?
Lava tube
It runs about 65 kilometres and drops 1,100 metres inside a flow that erupted around 500 years ago.
Q 20The Cave of the Crystals beneath the Naica mine in Mexico holds beams up to 11 metres long of which mineral?
Gypsum
The air reaches 58 °C with near-total humidity, so unprotected visitors can last only minutes.
Q 24The two known caves deeper than 2,000 metres, Krubera and Veryovkina, are both in which mountain range?
Arabika Massif, Caucasus
They lie in Abkhazia; Krubera is also called Voronya, "crows' cave", after the birds nesting in its entrance pit.
Q 25Rising Star Cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind yielded fossils of which hominin species, announced in 2015?
Homo naledi
The route to the fossil chamber includes "Superman's Crawl", passable only with one arm stretched ahead.
Q 26Derinkuyu, an underground city carved into soft volcanic tuff and able to shelter 20,000 people, is in which region of Turkey?
Cappadocia
Its name means "deep well", after the shafts that supplied water; the whole complex could be sealed from inside with rolling stone doors.
Q 27The Wookey Hole caves in Somerset are used by a local dairy to mature which food?
Cheddar cheese
The caves hold a steady 11 °C; the same show cave houses a human-shaped rock formation known as the Witch of Wookey.
Q 28Movile Cave in Romania, sealed off for 5.5 million years, hosts an ecosystem based entirely on what?
Chemosynthesis
Its air is rich in hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide and poor in oxygen; only a handful of researchers are ever allowed in.
Q 29The Jenolan Caves west of Sydney claim what world record?
Oldest known open cave system
The network follows an underground river and has over 300 entrances, still being explored.
Q 30Cenotes, the water-filled sinkholes used by the Maya for water and sacrifice, are concentrated on which peninsula?
Yucatán
A dense ring of them traces the buried rim of the Chicxulub impact crater.