David Attenborough Trivia
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53 free David Attenborough trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
David Attenborough trivia for anyone who grew up with that hushed voice explaining what the lyrebird was doing. The quiz starts in Leicester, where a boy sold newts to the university zoology department, and follows him through Cambridge, the Navy, a BBC that thought his teeth were too big for television, and the 1954 series Zoo Quest that made him a presenter by accident. Then it covers the part of his career many fans skip: the years running BBC Two, when he scrapped the kangaroo mascot, commissioned Civilisation and Monty Python's Flying Circus, and put snooker on colour television. From there it works through the nine Life series, Wildlife on One, The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Blue Planet II and the Netflix films, before finishing with the ship, the studio, the album cover and the twenty-odd species that carry his name. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this one, try our nature, animals and BBC quizzes next.
30 of 53 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Attenborough was born just 17 days after which other British national figure?
Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II — the two near-twins shared the screen in 2018, when she showed him round the Buckingham Palace gardens for the documentary The Queen's Green Planet.
Q 02Attenborough grew up on the campus of which institution, where his father was principal?
University College, Leicester
University College, Leicester — his father Frederick was principal and the family lived on campus; the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes so admired young David's fossil collection that she sent him a box of specimens.
Q 03What did David's older brother Richard become famous as?
An actor and film director
An actor and film director — Richard Attenborough went from starring in The Great Escape to directing Gandhi, which won him an Oscar, and later played the park owner in Jurassic Park.
Q 04In 2019 a 93-year-old Attenborough made a surprise appearance on stage at which British music festival?
Glastonbury
Glastonbury — he walked on to the Pyramid Stage before Kylie Minogue's set to the recorded calls of sea creatures, and the festival crowd greeted him with a huge roar.
Q 05In 1936 a lecture by which beaver-saving conservationist inspired the young Attenborough?
Grey Owl
Grey Owl — the 'Native American' on stage was really an Englishman, Archibald Belaney from Hastings, who had gone to Canada and reinvented himself.
Q 06Attenborough won a scholarship to Cambridge in 1945 to study what?
Natural sciences
Natural sciences — the degree led first to a desk, not the wild: he spent a couple of years editing children's science textbooks before television lured him away.
Q 07Attenborough spent national service stationed on the Firth of Forth with which branch of the forces?
Royal Navy
Royal Navy — called up in 1947, he spent his two years stationed in North Wales and on the Firth of Forth rather than anywhere exotic.
Q 08Why was Attenborough initially discouraged from appearing on camera at the BBC?
His teeth were thought too big
His teeth were thought too big — that was the verdict of an early boss at the BBC, so he started out behind the camera as a producer instead.
Q 09Which 1954 series launched Attenborough's presenting career?
Zoo Quest
Zoo Quest followed animal-collecting expeditions for London Zoo; Attenborough only ended up in front of the camera because the planned presenter fell ill.
Q 10In the 1950s Attenborough sailed to a remote Indonesian island to film which giant reptile for television for the first time?
Komodo dragon
Komodo dragon — viewers saw the lizard in black and white, but the trip had been shot on colour film, and the forgotten reels were found and finally shown in colour for his 90th birthday.
Q 11Attenborough left BBC staff in the early 1960s to study for a postgraduate degree in what?
Social anthropology
Social anthropology — he enrolled for the degree at the London School of Economics but never finished it, because the BBC lured him back to run BBC Two.
Q 12Attenborough quit BBC management while tipped for which senior post?
Director-General
Director-General — he was tiring of desk-bound executive life, so he resigned and persuaded the BBC to let him make a Civilisation-style series on evolution, which became Life on Earth.
Q 13BBC Two, which Attenborough took over in 1965, launched with which mother-and-baby animal mascot?
A kangaroo
Q 21Which 1990 series on animal behaviour completed Attenborough's original 1979-1990 trilogy?
The Trials of Life
The Trials of Life (1990) — its crew worked closely with field researchers, which let them film chimpanzees hunting together as a coordinated team.
Q 22Which 1993 Attenborough series followed Antarctica's wildlife through the seasons of a single year?
Life in the Freezer
Life in the Freezer (1993) — it followed Antarctica's year, from a winter so harsh that most animals leave to a summer when seals and penguins race to raise their young.
Q 23Which technique let Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants (1995), a Peabody winner, show plants as dynamic organisms?
A kangaroo — Hullabaloo, the mother, stood for the established BBC1 and Custard, the joey in her pouch, for the newborn BBC2.
Q 14Which sport did Attenborough bring to the BBC to show off the benefits of colour television?
Snooker
Snooker — he commissioned Pot Black in 1969, reasoning that a game decided by the colours of its balls was the perfect advert for the new colour sets.
Q 15Which change came to tennis after Attenborough's colour broadcasts left television viewers struggling to follow play?
Yellow balls
Yellow balls — the white ones were hard to pick out on the colour pictures he had brought to BBC Two, so the sport switched to a fluorescent yellow that cameras could follow.
Q 16Who presented Civilisation, the 1969 series on Western art that Attenborough commissioned to show off colour television?
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Clark presented Civilisation, which became the blueprint for the big authored documentary series that BBC insiders nicknamed 'sledgehammers'.
Q 17Which 1973 history-of-science series did Attenborough commission as BBC Two's counterpart to Civilisation?
The Ascent of Man
The Ascent of Man — Jacob Bronowski's series followed the Civilisation model, and Attenborough thought the story of evolution deserved the same epic treatment, the idea that became Life on Earth.
Q 18Which young Irish broadcaster's application to present on BBC Two did Attenborough turn down in 1965?
Terry Wogan
Terry Wogan — Attenborough rejected the young Irishman's application, later explaining that BBC Two already had one Irish announcer and two 'would have looked ridiculous'.
Q 19Which apes played with Attenborough in a famous Life on Earth scene?
Gorillas
Gorillas — a family of mountain gorillas in Rwanda played with him and a youngster tried to take off his shoes, and he later called it one of the most exciting encounters of his life.
Q 20Which 1984 series, built around the theme of ecology, followed Life on Earth?
The Living Planet
The Living Planet (1984) — after eleven episodes touring wild habitats, its last turned to the newest environments of all: the ones humans have made by changing the Earth.
Time-lapse photography
Time-lapse photography sped up growth too slow for the eye to follow, and the Peabody Award citation praised the series for showing how compelling it can be to watch gardens grow.
Q 24Life in Cold Blood (2008) completed Attenborough's survey of terrestrial life by covering which animals?
Reptiles and amphibians
Reptiles and amphibians — Life in Cold Blood (2008) was the last of Attenborough's nine Life series, closing his survey of life on land, from crocodiles to chameleons.
Q 25Attenborough was in his mid-90s before he finally presented a major series on the wildlife of which place?
The British Isles
The British Isles — Wild Isles (2023) took three years to film, and he said the animal dramas on his doorstep matched anything he had seen on his global travels.
Q 26Which Kalahari animals starred in the 1987 Wildlife on One film that BBC viewers voted the best wildlife documentary ever?
Meerkats
Meerkats — 'Meerkats United' starred animals that take turns standing guard, watching for danger while the rest of the pack forages.
Q 27In a famous Planet Earth II chase scene, newly hatched marine iguanas ran a gauntlet of which animals?
Snakes
Snakes — racer snakes poured from the rocks after each hatchling, and one iguana's narrow escape won Planet Earth II the 2017 Bafta for television's must-see moment.
Q 28Planet Earth (2006), then the biggest nature documentary ever made for television, was the first BBC wildlife series shot in what format?
High definition
High definition — a powerful stabilised aerial camera let the crew film animals from high above without disturbing them, on the most expensive nature series the BBC had commissioned.
Q 29Who composed the main theme for Planet Earth II (2016)?
Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer — he wrote the main theme while Jacob Shea and Jasha Klebe scored the episodes, and he returned for Blue Planet II, reworking Radiohead's 'Bloom', a song the first Blue Planet had inspired.
Q 30Blue Planet II (2017) is credited with triggering lasting public attention to which issue?
Plastic pollution
Plastic pollution — more than 14 million watched, the UK's biggest audience of 2017, and within months the BBC itself pledged to rid its own operations of single-use plastics by 2020.