Caves Trivia
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58 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 58 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
Limestone (calcium carbonate) dissolves in rainwater charged with carbonic acid, which 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
Speleology. Édouard-Alfred Martel, its "father", and his crew were the first to explore many caves that are now famous tourist attractions.
Q 03Which cave formation builds up from the floor where mineral-rich water drips?
Stalagmite
Stalagmite. Each drip leaves a little calcite behind, and when a stalagmite grows into the stalactite feeding it, the pair join into a column.
Q 04Which cave system in Kentucky has the greatest total length of surveyed passage of any in the world, over 675 km?
Mammoth Cave
Mammoth Cave. In 1972 cavers found a passage linking it to the even longer Flint Ridge system next door, joining the two into one vast network.
Q 05In which country is Sơn Đoòng, the cave with the largest known passage in the world?
Vietnam
Vietnam. Hồ Khanh found the entrance in 1990 while out gathering wood, then lost track of it in the jungle and only found it again in 2008.
Q 06Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, is the summer home of the largest colony of which animals on Earth?
Mexican free-tailed bats
Mexican free-tailed bats. Up to 20 million roost there each summer, and in 2014 San Antonio and conservation groups bought land beside the cave to keep a housing development away.
Q 07Waitomo Cave in New Zealand is famous for a ceiling lit by thousands of what?
Glowworms
Glowworms. They are the larvae of a fungus gnat, dangling sticky silk threads that snare insects drawn to their 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
Lie flat in a small rowboat. The entrance is only about a metre high, so the boatman pulls the boat through on a metal chain fixed to the cave wall.
Q 09In 2018, twelve boys and their football coach were trapped for over two weeks in the Tham Luang cave in which country?
Thailand
Thailand. Divers found the Wild Boars alive after nine days, and all 13 were brought out between 8 and 10 July, the boys sedated for the dive.
Q 10The Paleolithic paintings of Lascaux, with its Hall of the Bulls, are in which country?
France
France. Four teenagers found Lascaux in 1940, but crowds of visitors brought damp and mould that damaged the paintings, so it closed to the public in 1963.
Q 11Which Siberian cave gave its name to an extinct group of archaic humans identified from a finger bone in 2010?
Denisova Cave
Denisova Cave. The finger bone had no telltale features, so the new human group was recognised from its DNA alone.
Q 12Fingal's Cave, the sea cave linked to Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, is on which Scottish island?
Staffa
Staffa. The cave's walls are hexagonal basalt columns that formed as an ancient lava flow cooled, like those of Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway.
Q 13Cave-dwelling animals such as blind fish and pale salamanders that cannot live outside caves are called what?
Troglobites
Troglobites. Some blind cavefish still belong to the same species as sighted river fish, and the two can interbreed.
Q 21The Sarawak Chamber, the largest cave room by area, lies in Gunung Mulu National Park on which island?
Borneo
Borneo. A scientist followed a stream upstream to the cave's mouth, and cavers who went in later found the chamber.
Q 22Which Ardèche cave, found in 1994, is the subject of Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'?
Chauvet
Chauvet. Only a select few scientists are allowed inside, so Herzog needed the culture minister's green light to film there.
Q 23Cueva de las Manos, a UNESCO site of stencilled hands, is in which country?
Argentina
Argentina. Hunter-gatherers drawn by herds of guanacos made the stencils, and they painted galloping guanacos beside the hands.
Q 14Which blind, pale European cave salamander can survive for years without eating?
The olm
The olm. When heavy rains flushed olms out of their caves, locals took the pale, eyeless creatures for the offspring of a dragon.
Q 15The Cave of Altamira, famous for its Paleolithic bison paintings, is in which country?
Spain
Spain. Sautuola's daughter María spotted the painted ceiling in 1879, but experts scorned the find until a leading sceptic published a mea culpa in 1902.
Q 16The word "karst", for landscapes of sinkholes and underground drainage, is associated with a plateau in which country?
Slovenia
Slovenia. Geologists took Karst, the German name for the Kras plateau it shares with Italy, and applied it to similar landscapes elsewhere.
Q 17India's Ajanta Caves, rock-cut monasteries full of ancient murals, were built by followers of which religion?
Buddhism
Buddhism. A British officer on a tiger hunt reached the caves in 1819, and as word of his find spread, visitors followed.
Q 18Lechuguilla Cave and Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico were carved from below by what, formed from gas rising off oil deposits?
Sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid formed when hydrogen sulfide mixed with groundwater and ate upward; most caves are dissolved from above by rainwater.
Q 19Kazumura Cave in Hawaii is the world's longest example of what kind of cave?
Lava tube
Lava tube. It formed when the surface of a lava flow crusted over while molten rock kept flowing beneath, then drained away to leave a tunnel.
Q 20The Cave of the Crystals beneath the Naica mine in Mexico holds beams up to 11 metres long of which mineral?
Gypsum
Gypsum. The crystals grew as hot, mineral-rich groundwater slowly cooled, and the air is so hot and humid that people without cooling gear last only about ten minutes.
Q 24Krubera and Veryovkina, the two deepest caves known in 2018, lie in which mountain range?
Arabika Massif, Caucasus
Arabika Massif, Caucasus. In September 2018 a rainstorm flooded Veryovkina's lower levels while a team was deep inside, and they narrowly escaped.
Q 25Rising Star Cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind yielded fossils of which hominin species, announced in 2015?
Homo naledi
Homo naledi. The chamber was so hard to reach that Lee Berger advertised on Facebook for skinny scientists who weren't claustrophobic, and six women took the job.
Q 26Derinkuyu, an underground city carved into soft volcanic tuff and able to shelter 20,000 people, is in which region of Turkey?
Cappadocia
Cappadocia. The city lay forgotten until 1963, when a local man renovating his house broke into its passages.
Q 27In Homer's Odyssey, which Cyclops traps Odysseus and his men in his cave?
Polyphemus
Polyphemus. Odysseus says his name is Noman, so when the blinded giant cries that Noman is killing him, the other Cyclopes think no one is hurting him.
Q 28Movile Cave in Romania, sealed off for 5.5 million years, hosts an ecosystem based entirely on what?
Chemosynthesis
Chemosynthesis. In air with about half the normal oxygen, bacteria draw energy by oxidising gases such as methane, and the cave's whole food web depends on them.
Q 29Clay dated in 2006 to about 340 million years made which caves west of Sydney the oldest known open caves?
Jenolan Caves
Jenolan Caves. Geologists had estimated them at 90 to 100 million years old until a clay-dating method developed for oil exploration pushed the figure past 340 million.
Q 30Cenotes, the sinkholes the ancient Maya used for water, are concentrated on which peninsula?
Yucatán
Yucatán. A ring of cenotes there marks the buried rim of the Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid impact most scientists blame for wiping out the dinosaurs.