Extinction
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50 free Extinction trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
More than 99 percent of the species that have ever lived are gone. Extinction is the rule of life on Earth, and the stories of how it happens, whether in one catastrophic day or across a slow century of hunting, are some of the strangest in science. This quiz covers the whole subject: the great mass extinctions of deep time and what caused them, the famous animals lost since people began keeping records, the scientists who worked out that a species can disappear at all, and the rescues that pulled a few back from the edge. It suits students revising for a biology or earth science class, teachers who want a ready-made round, and anyone who has wondered what happened to the dodo. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The dodo, a flightless bird last reliably seen in 1662, lived only on which Indian Ocean island?
Mauritius
Mauritius had no mammal predators, so the dodo probably nested on the ground. The pigs, rats and macaques that arrived with people plundered those nests.
Q 02The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried beneath which country?
Mexico
Mexico hides the crater under its Yucatán Peninsula, where geophysicists who were looking for petroleum found it in the late 1970s.
Q 03Which North American bird, once flocking in the billions, died out when Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914?
Passenger pigeon
The passenger pigeon may once have been the most numerous bird on Earth, but intense hunting and the felling of its forests finished it within decades.
Q 04Which striped marsupial predator died out in 1936, when the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo?
Tasmanian tiger
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was blamed for killing sheep, and the island's government paid a bounty of one pound for each dead adult.
Q 05Which Ice Age giant survived on Arctic Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago, after Egypt's Great Pyramid was built?
Woolly mammoth
The woolly mammoth had vanished from the mainland by about 10,000 years ago, but an isolated island herd hung on for some 6,000 years more.
Q 06Which fish, known only from fossils tens of millions of years old, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?
Coelacanth
The coelacanth was spotted in a local fisherman's catch by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and the living genus Latimeria is named after her.
Q 07Lonesome George, who died in the Galápagos in 2012 as the last of his kind, was which type of animal?
Giant tortoise
Giant tortoise George was first seen on Pinta Island in 1971, and years of pairing him with related females produced only eggs that failed to hatch.
Q 08Which 1962 book by Rachel Carson documented the environmental harm caused by indiscriminate use of the pesticide DDT?
Silent Spring
Silent Spring led to an American ban on the chemical in farming, a major factor in the bald eagle's comeback from near-extinction in the lower 48 states.
Q 09Which giant prehistoric shark, with teeth over 18 centimetres long, died out about 3.6 million years ago?
Megalodon
Megalodon means big tooth, and teeth are most of what survives, because a shark's skeleton is cartilage and fossilises poorly.
Q 10Which naturalist, visiting the Falkland Islands in 1833, predicted the tame wolf living there would soon be extinct?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was proved right in 1876, after settlers who saw the Falkland Islands wolf as a threat to their sheep had poisoned it and hunted it for fur.
Q 11Which rare metal, scarce in Earth's crust, enriches the clay layer laid down worldwide when the dinosaurs died?
Iridium
Iridium at hundreds of times its normal level turned up in that layer around the world, which led a father-and-son team to propose an asteroid impact in 1980.
Q 12The Great Dying, Earth's most severe known extinction, struck about 252 million years ago at the end of which period?
Permian
The Permian closed with the loss of an estimated 81% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species.
Q 13Eruptions blamed for the Great Dying buried a vast stretch of which region under lava?
Siberia
Siberia still holds that lava as rock formations called traps, and the gases the eruptions released heated the planet and turned the oceans acidic.
Q 21Which flightless North Atlantic seabird, the original owner of the name penguin, was last confirmed alive in 1844?
Great auk
The great auk's last confirmed pair was killed on Eldey, off Iceland, while incubating an egg, at the request of a merchant who wanted specimens.
Q 22Which flightless birds, the tallest reaching 3.6 metres, died out within a century of people settling New Zealand?
Moa
Moa were the largest land animals in New Zealand and had just one predator, a huge eagle, until overhunting by the first settlers finished them.
Q 23Which giant, slow-moving mammal of the North Pacific was hunted to extinction within 27 years of Europeans finding it?
Steller's sea cow
Q 14Which sea creatures, among the most successful early animals, died out after almost 270 million years in the oceans?
Trilobites
Trilobites had been declining for a long time, and only a handful of species were left when the worst mass extinction of all finished them off.
Q 15Which French naturalist showed around 1800 that some fossil bones came from species that no longer existed?
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier compared fossil bones with those of living elephants and showed they came from animals no longer alive, an idea many of his peers called speculation.
Q 16Luis Alvarez, who proposed with his son that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, held a Nobel Prize in which field?
Physics
Physics brought Alvarez the 1968 prize for particle discoveries made with hydrogen bubble chambers, twelve years before the dinosaur theory.
Q 17The mass extinction that killed three-quarters of all species 66 million years ago ended which geological period?
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous closed with the loss of every non-avian dinosaur, while sea turtles and crocodilians were among the few large animals to come through.
Q 18Which gas, released by microbes about 2.4 billion years ago, is thought to have killed off much of early life?
Oxygen
Oxygen from cyanobacteria built up in the air and shallow seas, an upheaval inferred to have been a mass extinction but left off the usual lists.
Q 19Glyptodonts, heavily armoured plant-eaters of Ice Age South America, were giant relatives of which living animals?
Armadillos
Armadillos were suspected from the start: the missionary who first recorded a glyptodont shell in the 1750s said it came from a giant one, and he was right.
Q 20The ongoing extinction event caused by human activity is usually named after which geological epoch, the current one?
Holocene
The Holocene extinction is running at an estimated 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate at which species disappear.
Steller's sea cow grazed on kelp around a few remote islands and was so easy to catch that hunters wiped it out for its meat, fat and hide.
Q 24The quagga, a South African animal extinct in the wild by 1878, was a subspecies of which living species?
Plains zebra
The plains zebra's lost southern form was striped mainly on the head and neck, and a breeding project now selects zebras for that look.
Q 25Which Ice Age predator, found by the hundred in the La Brea Tar Pits, had canine teeth up to 28 centimetres long?
Smilodon
Smilodon, the best-known saber-toothed cat, could open its jaws wider than any modern cat, but its canines were slender and fragile, made for precise bites.
Q 26The golden toad, a bright orange species last seen in 1989, lived only in a cloud forest in which country?
Costa Rica
Costa Rica featured the golden toad on posters promoting its biodiversity, but after 1989 extensive searches never found another one.
Q 27The baiji, a freshwater dolphin declared functionally extinct in 2006, lived only in which Asian river?
Yangtze
The Yangtze dolphin was nicknamed the goddess of the river by local fishermen, yet a six-week survey by 30 researchers failed to find a single one.
Q 28Which wild goat became in 2003 the first extinct animal to be cloned, though the newborn lived only minutes?
Pyrenean ibex
The Pyrenean ibex is the only animal to have gone extinct twice: the clone, grown from tissue of the last female, died of a lung defect.
Q 29Sudan, who died in Kenya in 2018 under round-the-clock armed guard, was the last male of which rhinoceros subspecies?
Northern white
Northern white rhinos numbered just three when Sudan died, and one of the two left behind was his own daughter, Najin.
Q 30The aurochs, whose last known animal died in a Polish forest in 1627, was the wild ancestor of which livestock?
Cattle
Cattle descend from the aurochs, a horned giant that Ice Age artists painted on cave walls at sites such as Lascaux.