Extinct Animals
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50 free Extinct Animals trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Extinction is the rule, not the exception: almost every kind of animal that has ever lived has already vanished. Some faded out over millions of years. Others, like the dodo, disappeared within a lifetime of being discovered, and a few were last seen alone in a zoo enclosure. This quiz covers the full sweep of extinct animals: Ice Age giants such as the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed cats, birds and sea mammals hunted out in recent centuries, prehistoric monsters known only from fossils, and the mass extinctions that reset life on Earth. You will also meet the fossil hunters and naturalists who worked out that a species could vanish for good, and a few creatures that turned up alive after being written off. The questions suit curious adults, students and families, and they work well as a classroom or pub quiz round. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing how each animal disappeared and what it left behind.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which Indian Ocean island did the dodo live before vanishing within a century of Dutch sailors arriving?
Mauritius
Mauritius was the dodo's only home, and the last widely accepted sighting came in 1662, just 64 years after Dutch sailors first recorded the bird.
Q 02Which striped marsupial predator died out when its last known animal perished at a Hobart zoo in 1936?
Tasmanian tiger
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, won official protection just 59 days before the last known one died in captivity.
Q 03Which North American bird once flew in flocks of billions before the last one died in a zoo in 1914?
Passenger pigeon
The passenger pigeon numbered three to five billion at its peak and may have been the most numerous bird on Earth. Martha, the last of her kind, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Q 04The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried in which country?
Mexico
Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula hides the crater, which went unnoticed until geophysicists searching for petroleum mapped it in the late 1970s.
Q 05Which fish, thought extinct for 66 million years, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?
Coelacanth
The coelacanth was spotted among a local fisherman's catch by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and the living genus Latimeria now carries her name.
Q 06Which prehistoric ocean giant, known mostly from hand-sized fossil teeth, was the largest predatory shark ever?
Megalodon
Megalodon teeth can top 18 centimetres, and Roman folklore held that they were petrified tongues that fell from the sky during lunar eclipses.
Q 07Which Los Angeles fossil site trapped sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves during the last Ice Age?
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are still seeping: asphalt has oozed up there for tens of thousands of years, at times forming deposits thick enough to trap animals.
Q 08Which biblical figure lends his name to species rediscovered alive after being written off as extinct?
Lazarus
Lazarus, raised from the dead in the Gospel of John, gives the Lazarus taxon its name: a group that drops out of the record and then reappears, sometimes as living creatures.
Q 09Which Victorian children's novel features a talking Dodo who organises a Caucus-race to get everyone dry?
Alice in Wonderland
In Alice in Wonderland the Dodo is a caricature of Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Dodgson and whose stutter sometimes turned it into Dodo-Dodgson.
Q 10Lonesome George, who died in 2012 as the last tortoise of his kind, came from which island group?
Galápagos
The Galápagos island of Pinta was George's home, where a snail scientist first spotted him in 1971, and decades of attempts to mate him all failed.
Q 11Which flightless North Atlantic seabird, the first bird ever called a penguin, was hunted to extinction by 1844?
Great auk
The great auk's last two confirmed birds were killed on Eldey, off Iceland, and the penguins of the Southern Hemisphere were later named for looking like it.
Q 12Which South African zebra, striped mainly on its front half, died out when the last one died in Amsterdam?
Quagga
The quagga was long thought to be a separate species, but DNA studies showed it was a subspecies of the plains zebra, hunted out by the late 19th century.
Q 13Which slow-moving North Pacific sea mammal was hunted to extinction within 27 years of Europeans discovering it?
Steller's sea cow
Q 21Which armoured sea creatures thrived for almost 270 million years before the worst mass extinction finished them off?
Trilobites
Trilobites left more than 22,000 described species behind, yet only a handful of species were still alive when the end came about 252 million years ago.
Q 22Which coiled-shelled sea creatures, closer kin to squid than to the nautilus, vanished alongside the dinosaurs?
Ammonites
Ammonites spread into more than 10,000 described species, and geologists still use them as index fossils to date the rock layers they turn up in.
Q 23Which geological period ended with the Great Dying, the most severe mass extinction in Earth's history?
Permian
Steller's sea cow grew up to nine metres long and was too buoyant to dive fully under, which made it easy prey for hunters after its meat, fat and hide.
Q 14Which country was home to the moa, giant wingless birds wiped out within a century of human settlement?
New Zealand
New Zealand lost all nine moa species to overhunting, and the birds were so thoroughly wingless that they lacked even the vestigial stubs other ratites have.
Q 15The elephant bird, which laid the largest eggs of any known bird, reptile or mammal, lived on which island?
Madagascar
Madagascar's elephant birds died out around AD 1000, probably because of people, and their closest living relatives turn out to be the kiwi.
Q 16Which wild ox, the ancestor of modern domestic cattle, died out in a Polish forest in 1627?
Aurochs
The aurochs was domesticated twice, once in the Fertile Crescent and once in India, giving rise to both taurine cattle and the zebu.
Q 17Which Ice Age deer, often dug out of peat bogs, carried the largest antlers of any known deer?
Irish elk
The Irish elk was neither only Irish nor an elk: it ranged from Ireland to Lake Baikal, and its closest living relatives are fallow deer.
Q 18The golden toad, last seen in the Monteverde cloud forest in 1989, lived only in which country?
Costa Rica
Costa Rica's golden toad was a poster animal for the country's biodiversity, though its whole range covered only about four square kilometres.
Q 19The baiji, a river dolphin feared extinct and once revered as a goddess by fishermen, lived in which river?
Yangtze
The Yangtze was the baiji's only home, and surveys there led scientists to call it the first dolphin species in history driven to extinction by humans.
Q 20Which wild goat became the first extinct animal brought back by cloning, although the newborn lived only minutes?
Pyrenean ibex
The Pyrenean ibex clone was born in Spain in 2003 from the last female's preserved tissue, which makes this the only animal to have gone extinct twice.
The Permian closed with the loss of 81% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species, a blow that also ended the whole Paleozoic era.
Q 24Fossils of Titanoboa, a 13-metre snake that lived soon after the dinosaurs, came from a coal mine in which country?
Colombia
Colombia's Cerrejón coal mines yielded 186 Titanoboa fossils, and the semi-aquatic giant is thought to have fed mainly on fish.
Q 25Glyptodon, an Ice Age mammal with a domed shell of bony plates, was a giant form of which animals?
Armadillos
Armadillos were the guess of the missionary who recorded the first glyptodont shell in Argentina in the 1750s, and he turned out to be right.
Q 26Megatherium, an elephant-sized Ice Age mammal from South America, was a ground-dwelling giant among which animals?
Sloths
Sloths today hang in trees, but Megatherium weighed up to four tonnes and roamed the Pampas on the ground.
Q 27Archaeopteryx, the feathered Jurassic fossil linking dinosaurs to birds, was found in limestone in which country?
Germany
Germany's Archaeopteryx was named in 1861 from a single feather, and the animal itself still had sharp teeth, clawed fingers and a long bony tail.
Q 28Which extinct flying reptiles, often wrongly called dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight?
Pterosaurs
Pterosaurs ranged from very small species to giants with wingspans of at least nine metres, the largest flying creatures known.
Q 29Which fossil hunter from Lyme Regis found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at age twelve?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning went on to find the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons in the same Dorset sea cliffs.
Q 30Which French naturalist, called the founding father of paleontology, established extinction as a scientific fact?
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier showed that elephant-like bones from North America belonged to a vanished animal he named the mastodon, when many still dismissed extinction as speculation.