Elephants
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90 free Elephants trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
35 free elephant trivia questions with answers on the largest land animals alive. The biology rounds cover what makes an elephant an elephant: a boneless trunk with tens of thousands of muscle bundles, tusks that are really teeth, molars that arrive on a conveyor belt, sweat glands in an odd place, a two-year pregnancy and rumbles too low for humans to hear. There are questions on how herds are led, how far the seismic footsteps carry, and which sea creatures are the elephants' nearest relatives. The rest of the quiz turns to elephants in history and culture: Jumbo's sale from London Zoo and his death in a Canadian rail yard, Disney's Dumbo, the white elephants of Buddhist tradition, the last woolly mammoths and the zoo elephants that recognised themselves in a mirror or learned to say a few words. Difficulty runs from easy questions a child could answer to ones that will stretch a wildlife biologist, and every answer is checked against a cited source.
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Q 01What name is given to the loud call an elephant makes by blasting air through its trunk?
Trumpeting
Trumpeting signals excitement, distress or aggression, yet most elephant talk is the opposite: soft, low rumbles made in the voice box rather than the trunk.
Q 02An elephant's boneless trunk is a fusion of its nose and which other part?
Upper lip
Upper lip: fused with the nose, it makes a trunk of some 150,000 muscle bundles and not a single bone, which is why the trunk can bend in any direction and still hoist a load of a few hundred kilos.
Q 03What are an elephant's tusks actually?
Elongated incisor teeth
Elongated incisor teeth: the tusks are upper incisors that keep growing through life, and in a drought elephants use them to dig for water in dry riverbeds.
Q 04Which member of an elephant herd typically takes charge?
Oldest female
Herds are led by a matriarch, the oldest female, whose decades of memory guide the family to water and food; older matriarchs judge threats such as lion roars more accurately than younger ones.
Q 05What is the average gestation period for an elephant?
Approximately 22 months
Approximately 22 months, the longest pregnancy of any mammal, and it pays off: a newborn is on its feet within minutes and walking with the herd within two days.
Q 06About how much plant food does an adult elephant eat in a typical day?
About 150 kg
About 150 kg of grass, leaves, bark and fruit: appetites that size reshape the land, and elephants uprooting trees can turn wooded savanna into open grassland.
Q 07Which human pressure has selected for shorter tusks, even tusklessness, in wild elephants?
Poaching for ivory
Poaching for ivory kills the biggest-tusked animals first, so tuskless genes spread; the trade remains one of the biggest threats alongside habitat loss.
Q 08Which activity fills only a few hours of a wild elephant's day, among the least of any mammal?
Sleeping
Sleeping: two wild elephants fitted with trunk sensors averaged about two hours a night, the shortest of any mammal recorded, and sometimes went nearly two days with none at all.
Q 09What is the traditional South Asian name for the person who rides, trains and tends an elephant?
Mahout
Mahout reached English through Hindi from the Sanskrit mahamatra, literally 'one having great measure', a strikingly grand title for the person who feeds, washes and rides an elephant.
Q 10What name is given to the very low-frequency rumbles elephants use to communicate, too deep for people to hear?
Infrasound
Infrasound: zoologist Katy Payne, who had studied whale song, discovered the calls in the 1980s, and the rumbles keep elephants in contact across several kilometres.
Q 11Roughly how long can an elephant live in the wild?
About 65 years
About 65 years, a span capped by the teeth: once the sixth and last set of molars wears down in old age, an elephant can no longer chew its food and may starve.
Q 12Which small animal are African elephants so wary of that farmers use it to guard their crops?
Honeybees
Honeybees: elephants back away from the sound of an angry swarm, so farmers in East Africa string hives along their fences, a deterrent pioneered by the zoologist Lucy King.
Q 13Which country is home to more wild Asian elephants than any other?
India
India holds roughly half of the world's wild Asian elephants; because only the bulls carry tusks, ivory poachers in the south pick them off and leave herds heavily skewed toward females.
Q 21When an elephant is fully underwater, what does it use its trunk as?
A snorkel
A snorkel: elephants cross deep water with only the trunk tip showing, and alone among mammals their lungs are braced by dense tissue instead of a fluid-lined cavity, which may be what lets them breathe under that pressure.
Q 22The only sweat glands reported in an elephant's skin are found where?
Between the toes
Between the toes: the rest of the skin has no sweat glands, so elephants rely on shade, on bathing and on the water that evaporates slowly from their deeply wrinkled skin.
Q 23Unlike most mammals' teeth, how does a new molar arrive in an elephant's mouth?
It slides forward from the back
Q 14What is the railed, often canopied seat strapped to an elephant's back to carry riders called?
Howdah
Howdah comes through Urdu and Hindi from the Arabic hawdaj, a litter; on an elephant it became the seat from which the wealthy rode in processions, hunted and went to war.
Q 15Elephant ivory is composed almost entirely of which tooth material?
Dentine
Dentine makes up almost the whole tusk: a young tusk starts with a smooth enamel cap, but it soon wears away, leaving ivory whose cross-section shows a criss-cross 'engine-turned' grain.
Q 16What does an elephant do with water in its trunk?
Squirts it into its mouth
Squirts it into its mouth: the trunk is a nose, not a straw, so an elephant draws up several litres, curls the tip inward and pours, then sprays the next load over its back.
Q 17For which sense do elephants carry about 2,000 receptor genes, the most of any mammal studied?
Smell
Smell: that is more than twice a dog's count, and in field trials elephants showed more fear at the scent of clothes worn by Maasai men, who spear them, than at farmers' clothes.
Q 18Which elephant idiom describes an obvious problem that nobody wants to talk about?
The elephant in the room
The elephant in the room is recorded only from the 20th century, but the idea is older: in a Krylov fable of 1814 a museum visitor admires every tiny insect and fails to notice the elephant.
Q 19Which of these animals is among the closest living relatives of elephants?
Manatee
Elephants share the clade Paenungulata with the sirenians (dugongs and manatees) and the tiny hyraxes, not with the big grey mammals they resemble.
Q 20Which extinct elephant relative has a name meaning 'breast tooth', after the rounded cones on its molars?
Mastodon
Mastodon joins the Greek mastos, breast, and odon, tooth; those nipple-shaped cones were built for browsing on leaves and twigs rather than grinding grass.
It slides forward from the back, pushing the worn tooth out at the front like a conveyor belt; an elephant gets six sets of cheek teeth in a lifetime, each bigger than the last.
Q 24What is the fluid that runs down the side of a bull elephant's face during musth secreted from?
The temporal gland
The temporal gland, between eye and ear, secretes the dark oily temporin that streaks a musth bull's cheeks; such bulls are so aggressive they usually beat larger non-musth rivals.
Q 25Elephants, rhinos and hippos were once lumped together under which name?
Pachyderms
Pachyderms, from the Greek for 'thick-skinned': the old order Pachydermata was dropped once its members proved not to be close relatives, but the nickname stuck to the elephant.
Q 26P. T. Barnum bought the celebrity elephant Jumbo in 1882 from which zoo?
London Zoo
London Zoo sold its star amid a great outcry in England and great excitement in America, and his fame made 'jumbo' the everyday word for anything outsized.
Q 27How did the circus elephant Jumbo die in 1885?
He was hit by a freight train
He was hit by a freight train in a rail yard at St. Thomas, Ontario; Barnum told a story, possibly invented, that Jumbo died saving a small elephant called Tom Thumb.
Q 28In the 1941 Disney film Dumbo, what kind of animal is Dumbo's only real friend, Timothy?
A mouse
A mouse: Timothy is a joke on the old belief that elephants are terrified of mice, and it is he who scares off the bullying adults and whispers the idea for Dumbo's big act to the ringmaster in his sleep.
Q 29World Elephant Day began in 2012 with a film narrated by which Star Trek actor?
William Shatner
William Shatner narrated Return to the Forest, which follows captive elephants as they are set free to live wild in the forest again; it was released on the very first World Elephant Day, 12 August.
Q 30Where did the last known woolly mammoth population survive until about 4,000 years ago?
Wrangel Island
Wrangel Island, off Siberia's Arctic coast, held mammoths until about 2000 BC, meaning they were alive centuries after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.