Dinosaurs
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182 free Dinosaurs trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
75 free dinosaurs trivia questions with answers. They ruled the Earth for 165 million years, came in sizes from hummingbird to skyscraper, and vanished in a cosmic instant. From the mighty T. Rex to the feathered raptors, how much do you know about dinosaurs?
30 of 182 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which type of rock are nearly all dinosaur fossils found?
Sedimentary
Sedimentary: bones buried under sand, mud or silt survive as the layers harden, while most igneous and metamorphic rock forms under heat and pressure that ruin fossils.
Q 02Which geological period ended long before any dinosaur existed?
Cambrian
Cambrian: Adam Sedgwick named it in 1835 after Cambria, the Latin name for Wales, where he studied its rocks.
Q 03Which bird is the heaviest dinosaur alive today?
Ostrich
Ostrich: despite the myth, it doesn't bury its head in sand, though one lying low with its head and neck flat on the ground can look that way from afar.
Q 04Which sitcom's main characters include a paleontologist?
Friends
Friends: Ross Geller is a paleontologist, and in one episode he makes a huge fuss when someone at work eats his sandwich.
Q 05Microraptor, a small dinosaur from China, had an extra pair of feathered wings on which body part?
Its legs
Its legs: long flight feathers on its legs as well as its arms gave Microraptor four wings, and one skeleton holds a bird it had caught and eaten.
Q 06Which probable plant-eater had hand claws more than half a metre long?
Therizinosaurus
Therizinosaurus: it most likely used those claws to hook and pull leafy branches within reach, much as a sloth uses its long claws to reach food.
Q 07In which Ben Stiller comedy does a dinosaur skeleton come alive?
Night at the Museum
Night at the Museum: after it opened, New York's real natural history museum drew about a fifth more holiday visitors, a jump officials partly credited to the film.
Q 08Which cartoon family keeps a pet dinosaur named Dino?
The Flintstones
The Flintstones: Hanna-Barbera drew on the sitcom The Honeymooners, which is why its two neighbouring couples behave so much like that show's pairs.
Q 09Nigersaurus, a sauropod from Niger with a wide, vacuum-cleaner-like muzzle, had roughly how many teeth?
500
500: its teeth wore down so fast that each one was replaced about every 14 days, the fastest rate known for any dinosaur.
Q 10What does the word "dinosaur" mean?
Terrible lizard
Terrible lizard: Richard Owen coined the word in 1842, though he meant its Greek root in the sense of 'fearfully great', to evoke the animals' sheer size.
Q 11What is the name of the crater left by the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction?
Chicxulub Crater
Chicxulub Crater: geophysicists hunting for oil in Mexico found its buried outline years before scientists recognised it as the scar of the impact.
Q 12Jurassic Park gave which real dinosaur a fictional neck frill and the ability to spit venom?
Dilophosaurus
Dilophosaurus: Michael Crichton's novel invented the venom and the film's designers added the neck frill, but no fossil evidence backs either one.
Q 13Hadrosaurus, the first dinosaur skeleton ever mounted for display, was dug up in which state?
New Jersey
Q 21A large part of Tyrannosaurus rex's brain was devoted to which sense?
Smell
Smell: its huge olfactory bulbs suggest it could sniff out carcasses from far away, much as vultures do today.
Q 22Who directed the original 1993 film Jurassic Park?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg: he planned to animate the dinosaurs with go-motion puppets until a computer test by ILM impressed him so much that he switched to CGI.
Q 23Paleontologists call the spikes on Stegosaurus's tail the 'thagomizer', a word taken from what?
A Far Side cartoon
A Far Side cartoon: Gary Larson made the word up as a caveman joke, and it caught on so well that the Smithsonian used it as the spikes' official name.
New Jersey: Joseph Leidy reconstructed Hadrosaurus standing upright on its hind limbs, against the view then that such dinosaurs walked on all fours.
Q 14Which of these animals only appeared after the last non-bird dinosaurs had died out?
Woolly mammoths
Woolly mammoths: they arose long after the dinosaurs, and a small population still survived in the Arctic until about 4,000 years ago.
Q 15Iguanodon and the duck-billed hadrosaurs belong to which dinosaur group?
Ornithopods
Ornithopods: chewing was their big advantage, and hadrosaurs ground plants with batteries of stacked cheek teeth, one reason they became such successful plant-eaters.
Q 16Insects from the age of dinosaurs are often preserved in amber, which is fossilised what?
Tree resin
Tree resin: yet a 2013 study found no ancient DNA even in bees trapped in resin only about 10,000 years old, a blow to hopes of cloning dinosaurs.
Q 17About how long ago did the first dinosaurs appear?
About 230 million years ago
About 230 million years ago: yet dinosaurs only took over the land after a mass extinction about 200 million years ago wiped out many rival reptiles.
Q 18Which dinosaur had a club-like tail it could use as a weapon?
Ankylosaurus
Ankylosaurus: its first skeletal reconstruction had no tail club at all, because the club itself wasn't dug up until a later expedition.
Q 19Sail-backed Dimetrodon is often mistaken for a dinosaur, but it was more closely related to which animals?
Mammals
Mammals: Dimetrodon was an early synapsid, on the branch that led to mammals, and it died out in the Permian, long before any dinosaur lived.
Q 20Dinosaur Provincial Park, rich in Late Cretaceous fossils, is in which Canadian province?
Alberta
Alberta: erosion at the end of the last ice age carved out the park's badlands and laid bare its fossil-rich rock.
Q 24Which kind of plant first appeared long after the first dinosaurs?
Flowers
Flowers: flowering plants turned up more than 100 million years ago, so the earliest dinosaurs lived in a world without a single flower.
Q 25Which of these flying reptiles, living alongside dinosaurs, had the biggest wingspan?
Quetzalcoatlus
Quetzalcoatlus: with a wingspan of about 10 metres or more, it probably stalked small prey on the ground, much like a giant stork.
Q 26Which fish, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, was found alive off South Africa in 1938?
Coelacanth
Coelacanth: museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer spotted the strange fish and called in fish expert JLB Smith to identify it.
Q 27What is the name of the famous T. Rex skeleton on display at the Field Museum in Chicago?
Sue
Sue: it's named after fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson, who found it, and federal agents seized the skeleton in 1992 amid a fight over who owned it.
Q 28Pachycephalosaurus is best known for which distinctive feature?
Thick domed skull
Thick domed skull: some scientists think rivals rammed heads with it like bighorn sheep, while others argue the dome was mainly for display.
Q 29Which industrialist financed Dippy, the Diplodocus whose casts went to museums worldwide?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie: when Britain's king saw a drawing of the skeleton at Carnegie's Scottish home, Carnegie agreed to give the nation a cast of it.
Q 30When the first dinosaurs appeared, nearly all land was joined in which supercontinent?
Pangaea
Pangaea: that's why fossils of the same land animals, such as Lystrosaurus, turn up on continents that are now oceans apart.