Dung Beetles
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40 free Dung Beetles trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Dung beetles do one of nature's least glamorous jobs, and they do it with astonishing skill. They shape, roll, bury and guard animal droppings, steer across open ground after dark, fight rivals with horns, and quietly keep pastures and forests healthy across most of the world. This quiz gathers the fun facts people most often ask about: how the rollers, tunnelers and their stay-at-home cousins live, how the young develop underground, where dung beetles sit in the scarab family, and why ancient Egyptians carved them into amulets and linked them to the rising sun. You will also meet the scientists, farmers, storytellers and film-makers who took an interest in them. It is pitched at curious adults, students and anyone planning a nature round for a quiz night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few facts worth repeating.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which feature of the night sky did planetarium tests show dung beetles use to roll their balls in straight lines?
The Milky Way
The Milky Way alone was enough: beetles in a Johannesburg planetarium held a straight course when only its faint band was shown. Vertebrates such as birds were known to steer this way, but no insect had been.
Q 02Which Egyptian god of the rising sun was pictured as a man with a scarab dung beetle for a head?
Khepri
Khepri was believed to push the sun into the morning sky just as a scarab pushes a ball of dung along the ground. Egyptians wore beetle amulets as protective charms.
Q 03Relative to its size, the horned dung beetle Onthophagus taurus is considered which of these among all known animals?
The strongest
The strongest title comes from a male pulling 1,141 times its own body weight, like a person hauling six double-decker buses full of people.
Q 04Dung beetles thrive from deserts to forests on every continent except which one?
Antarctica
Antarctica is the one gap because dung beetles avoid extremely cold or dry weather. Everywhere else they work deserts, grasslands, farmland and forests.
Q 05Australia's native dung beetles evolved to bury the small, dry pellets of which animals, leaving cow pats untouched?
Kangaroos
Kangaroos and other marsupials leave hard, fibrous pellets, so native beetles ignored the soft pads of imported cattle, which then lay on the pasture for months or even years.
Q 06Which small American owl scatters mammal dung around its home as bait to attract dung beetles for food?
Burrowing owl
The burrowing owl lines the entrance of its underground nest with dung, usually from cattle, then picks off the beetles that come to investigate.
Q 07Ancient Egyptians buried their dead with a dung beetle amulet whose spell told which organ not to testify against them?
The heart
The heart was weighed against a feather when the dead were judged, so a stone scarab hung at the neck carried a Book of the Dead spell binding it to silence.
Q 08Which author's novella The Metamorphosis has a cleaning lady call the transformed Gregor Samsa an old dung beetle?
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka's narrator calls Gregor only a monstrous vermin, and Vladimir Nabokov, a butterfly expert as well as a novelist, concluded he was simply a big winged beetle.
Q 09Which adventure film recasts Egypt's sacred dung beetles as flesh-eating scarabs buried alive with the priest Imhotep?
The Mummy
The Mummy animated its swarms with techniques developed for Star Wars: Episode I, though real sacred scarabs feed only on dung.
Q 10A genus of long-legged, ball-rolling dung beetles is named after which figure from Greek mythology?
Sisyphus
Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity, a fitting namesake for more than 90 species that spend their lives rolling balls of dung.
Q 11Scientists sort dung beetles into rollers, tunnelers and which third group that neither rolls nor digs?
Dwellers
Dwellers simply live inside the dung pat, laying their eggs and raising their young right where it fell.
Q 12In Aesop's fable, a dung beetle takes revenge on which bird by rolling the eggs out of its nest?
An eagle
An eagle is the beetle's enemy, and it finally hides its eggs in the lap of Zeus; in one version the beetle rolls a ball of dung onto the god, who leaps up and lets them fall.
Q 13South Africa's flightless dung beetle survives mainly in a national park named after which animal?
The elephant
The elephant gives Addo Elephant National Park its name and the beetle much of its food; having lost the power of flight, the insect must walk from one dung pile to the next.
Q 21In which Aristophanes comedy about ending a war does the hero ride a giant dung beetle up to the gods?
Peace
Peace has the Athenian Trygaeus feed his beetle on dung and ride it to heaven, a parody of Euripides' play Bellerophon.
Q 22Which French naturalist showed that dung beetles seeming to help a roller were really waiting to steal its ball?
Jean-Henri Fabre
Jean-Henri Fabre, whom Charles Darwin called an inimitable observer, overturned the old belief by patient watching and simple experiments in the late 19th century.
Q 23Which tongue-in-cheek science award went in 2013 to five researchers studying how dung beetles navigate at night?
Ig Nobel Prize
Q 14Most dung beetles track down a fresh pile using mainly which sense, aided by antennae that fan out like leaves?
Smell
Smell is so sharp that a beetle can catch a whiff of dung on the air; some small species skip the search and simply cling to the animal and wait.
Q 15What are the pale, C-shaped larvae of dung beetles and other scarabs called as they feed inside a brood ball?
Grubs
Grubs hatch inside a ball of dung their parents buried and eat their way through it, hidden underground from sunlight and predators.
Q 16Between larva and adult, a dung beetle passes through which resting stage inside its buried brood ball?
Pupa
Pupa is the last stage before adulthood in the beetle's complete metamorphosis; the new adult then digs its way out and goes in search of fresh dung.
Q 17Which part of a fresh cow pat do adult dung beetles actually feed on, making dried-out dung useless to them?
The liquid
The liquid is a soup full of microorganisms, and some dung beetles have mouthparts built to suck it out from between the half-digested grass.
Q 18Dung beetles imported to Australia cut the numbers of which pest by around 90%?
Bush flies
Bush flies, the insects behind the gesture known as the Aussie salute, breed in dung pads, so beetles that bury a pad quickly leave them nowhere to lay eggs.
Q 19Dung beetles share the scarab family Scarabaeidae with giant horned beetles named after which animal?
The rhinoceros
The rhinoceros beetles also share the family with June beetles and Japanese beetles, while stag beetles, for all their similar looks, sit in a family of their own.
Q 20A female sacred scarab dung beetle sculpts her underground brood ball into the shape of which fruit?
A pear
A pear shape leaves a hollow in the narrow neck for a single large egg. A successful female raises only about half a dozen young in her whole life.
The Ig Nobel Prize honours research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. The beetle team won in a joint astronomy and biology category.
Q 24The dung beetle Scarabaeus zambesianus was the first animal found to steer by polarized light from which source?
The Moon
The Moon scatters a dim pattern of polarized light across the night sky, and a 2003 study in Nature showed the beetles use it to keep their course.
Q 25The rainforest dung beetle Deltochilum valgum has given up dung to hunt which prey, often far longer than itself?
Millipedes
Millipedes are gripped with its long, curved hind legs and bitten at a joint between body segments, which sometimes takes the head clean off.
Q 26The Iberian dung beetle Thorectes lusitanicus surprised researchers by preferring which tree nuts to dung?
Acorns
Acorns are buried by this beetle much as others bury dung, and because it does not always finish them, it helps oak trees spread.
Q 27George Bornemissza urged Australia to import dung beetles after comparing its pastures with those of which homeland?
Hungary
Hungary's fields were kept clean by dung beetles, while the Australian paddocks he saw in 1951 were strewn with old, dry cow pats. He went on to conceive and lead the Australian Dung Beetle Project.
Q 28What name is given to the hardened front wings that cover a dung beetle's flight wings like a case?
Elytra
Elytra swing open so that most dung beetles can take to the air, some travelling several miles to reach a fresh pat.
Q 29Ball-rolling dung beetles of the American genus Canthon are popularly known by which playful name?
Tumblebugs
Tumblebugs range from North to South America, and the nickname is also used loosely for ball-rolling dung beetles in general.
Q 30Which mythical monster gives its name to Typhaeus typhoeus, a dung beetle whose males bear three horn-like prongs?
The Minotaur
The Minotaur beetle lives in sandy parts of Europe and North Africa, and its scientific name honours a second terror of Greek myth, the giant Typhon.