Dinosaur Extinction Trivia
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49 free Dinosaur Extinction trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This dinosaur extinction trivia quiz covers the mass extinction of 66 million years ago, from the thin clay layer that gave the game away to the crater under the Yucatán. The easy questions are the ones any dinosaur fan should get: roughly when it happened, what most scientists think caused it, which peninsula hides the crater, and which living animals are the last dinosaurs. Then it gets tougher: the metal that is rare in Earth's crust but common in asteroids, the father-and-son team who spotted it in 1980, the oil geophysicist who found the crater a decade before anyone believed him, the shocked quartz and spherules, why crocodiles lived while T. rex died, the ammonites that never came back, the fern spike, the Deccan Traps debate, the North Dakota site that may record the first hours after impact, and how long it took mammals to reach 50 kilos. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, the Chicxulub crater, the Alvarez hypothesis and the Deccan Traps before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our dinosaurs, Jurassic and Triassic quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how many years ago did the extinction that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs occur?
66 million
66 million years replaced the long-quoted 65 million after sharper argon dating, which in 2013 also showed that the impact and the extinction fell within about 32,000 years of each other.
Q 02Which famous dinosaur was still alive when the asteroid struck at the end of the Cretaceous?
Triceratops
Triceratops was one of the very last non-avian dinosaurs, whereas Stegosaurus, Diplodocus and Allosaurus were already ancient fossils, having died out about 80 million years before the impact.
Q 03By what earlier name was the K-Pg mass extinction commonly known?
The K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary)
The K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) label gave way after geologists retired 'Tertiary' as a formal period and split its span between the Paleogene and the Neogene, so the boundary took the Paleogene's 'Pg'.
Q 04Which metal, more common in asteroids than in Earth's crust, is unusually abundant in the K-Pg clay?
Iridium
Iridium is scarce in Earth's crust because most of it sank into the core with iron, so a worldwide spike of it in one thin clay layer pointed to something arriving from space.
Q 05Which father-and-son team proposed in 1980 that an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs?
Luis and Walter Alvarez
Luis and Walter Alvarez had no crater to point to, and the idea met years of scepticism; Luis, a Nobel-winning physicist, died in 1988, shortly before the matching scar was finally identified.
Q 06The clay layer that inspired the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction was first sampled in which country?
Italy
Italy's Gubbio gorge gave the first samples, and when the same rare-metal spike turned up in Denmark and New Zealand the team knew the fallout had settled worldwide.
Q 07The asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs was closest in size to which of these?
Mount Everest
Mount Everest is the usual yardstick: at roughly 10 km across the rock would have stood taller than the mountain, yet it struck hard enough to gouge a crater well over a hundred kilometres wide.
Q 08On which peninsula does the Chicxulub crater lie?
The Yucatán, Mexico
The Yucatán, Mexico, shows no crater at the surface: the scar lies buried under about a kilometre of younger rock, which is why it stayed hidden until geophysical surveys picked it out.
Q 09Which body of water covers half of the buried Chicxulub crater?
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico covers the crater's northern half, and in 2016 a drilling rig offshore cored into its peak ring, a circle of hills thrown up within minutes of the impact.
Q 10The Chicxulub crater was first noticed in the late 1970s by geophysicists looking for what?
Petroleum
Petroleum surveys for Pemex mapped the buried ring, but the company judged it an old volcano; only when stored drill cores were re-examined around 1990 did shocked rock prove it was an impact scar.
Q 11What surface features, visible in satellite images, trace an arc above the buried rim of the Chicxulub crater?
Cenotes (sinkholes)
Cenotes (sinkholes) ring the buried rim, probably because groundwater heading for the coast is steered along it and eats the limestone above into flooded pits.
Q 12Grains of which common mineral, scarred by shock waves, turn up in the K-Pg boundary clay and helped prove an impact?
Quartz
Quartz takes on those microscopic scars only under a sudden, immense pulse of pressure, of the kind otherwise known from nuclear blasts and meteorite craters.
Q 13What covered the spot where the dinosaur-killing asteroid came down?
A shallow tropical sea
Q 21Why are crocodilians thought to have outlasted the non-avian dinosaurs?
They can go months without food
They can go months without food, and big adults far longer, because cold-blooded bodies burn so little fuel, which let them wait out the long collapse of the food chain.
Q 22Which group of dinosaurs survived the extinction and radiated into today's species?
Birds
Birds came through, but only just: one leading study suggests forests collapsed worldwide, wiping out the tree-dwelling kinds, so that today's species descend from ground-living survivors.
Q 23Which winged animals, often mistaken for dinosaurs, died out entirely in the K-Pg extinction?
Pterosaurs
A shallow tropical sea covered the site, so the ocean poured straight back into the fresh crater: drill cores show about 130 m of debris settled there on the very first day.
Q 14The dinosaur-killing asteroid struck rock rich in which element, making its aftermath deadlier?
Sulfur
Sulfur vapour from the target rock is counted among the main drivers of the die-off, but a 2025 study of the crater and its fallout found about five times less of it than models had assumed.
Q 15How did the Chicxulub impact chiefly cause the mass extinction?
A long winter that halted photosynthesis
A long winter that halted photosynthesis followed as dust and soot dimmed the sun for many months, so plants and plankton died first and the animals above them starved up the food chain.
Q 16Tiny spherules found in the boundary clay formed from what?
Droplets of molten rock from the impact
Droplets of molten rock from the impact froze into glass beads in flight and rained down far away; some ended up lodged in the gills of fish that were buried within hours.
Q 17Which vast volcanic province is the leading rival, or contributing, explanation for the dinosaurs' extinction?
The Deccan Traps
The Deccan Traps of India were erupting when the asteroid hit, but a 2020 modelling study found that only the impact made the world unlivable for dinosaurs, while the eruptions may even have softened the blow.
Q 18Lava provinces like those blamed in some dinosaur-extinction theories are called 'traps' after a Swedish word for what?
Stairs
Stairs, 'trappa' in Swedish, fit because flat sheets of old lava weather back into giant steps, giving such hills the look of a staircase.
Q 19Which earlier mass extinction, nicknamed the Great Dying, was even deadlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs?
The end-Permian
The end-Permian extinction, the worst on record, cleared the way for the dinosaurs themselves: their ancestors rose in the emptied world it left behind.
Q 20Which geological epoch opened immediately after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs?
The Paleocene
The Paleocene opened on an emptied world, and fossil leaves and pollen from Colombia show its forests closed over into dense, shaded canopies like today's rainforests.
Pterosaurs are often called flying dinosaurs but were a separate branch of reptiles, and unlike the dinosaurs they left no living descendants at all.
Q 24Which giant sea reptiles, like the one that steals scenes in Jurassic World, died out in the K-Pg extinction?
Mosasaurs
Mosasaurs were not dinosaurs but giant seagoing lizards, in the same group as today's lizards and snakes, and they were still thriving worldwide when the asteroid struck.
Q 25Which shelled sea animals, lookalikes of the living nautilus, died out at the K-Pg boundary?
Ammonites
Ammonites look like nautiluses but were probably closer kin to squid and octopuses; deep-living nautiluses are thought to have escaped the worst of the surface-water collapse.
Q 26The K in K-Pg comes from 'Kreide', the German word for which rock that also names the Cretaceous?
Chalk
Chalk gives the Cretaceous its name, from 'creta' in Latin, because the period's seas laid down thick white beds like those of southern England.
Q 27Which sea animals, which house algae in their tissues, were among the worst-hit groups in the K-Pg extinction?
Corals
Corals that built sunlit reefs lost most of their kinds because their live-in algae need light, while solitary deep-water forms, which have no such partners, came through far better.
Q 28Which kinds of land animals came through the K-Pg extinction best?
Omnivores, insectivores and scavengers
Omnivores, insectivores and scavengers could live off the dead: insects, worms and snails feed on rotting matter, the one food supply that kept going when green plants failed.
Q 29What size were the mammals that survived the extinction, generally?
About rat-sized
About rat-sized survivors did not stay small for long: within roughly 700,000 years some mammals weighed 50 kg, a hundred times as much as the animals that had come through the impact.
Q 30Which giant meat-eater was among the very last dinosaurs, living right up to the asteroid impact?
Tyrannosaurus rex
Tyrannosaurus rex appeared only in the dinosaurs' final two or three million years, whereas Spinosaurus and Giganotosaurus had died out nearly 30 million years before the impact.