Fingerprints Trivia
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100 free Fingerprints trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This fingerprints trivia quiz covers the ridges on your fingertips and the century of detective work built on them. The easy questions are ones anyone who has watched a crime drama could answer: the three basic pattern types, whether identical twins share prints, what dusting powder reveals, and which phone introduced Touch ID. The harder end is for forensics students and true-crime readers: the Babylonian contracts signed with a fingertip, the Bologna anatomist who saw ridges in 1686, the Scottish surgeon in Tokyo whose 1880 Nature paper started it all, the Bengal official who fingerprinted contracts from 1858, Galton's 1892 book, the Argentine mother convicted by a bloody thumb mark, the Deptford brothers hanged on a cash-box print, the Chicago and Madrid cases, the FBI's apology to Brandon Mayfield, the Scottish detective wrongly accused by her own force, the gene behind people born with no fingerprints, and the animal whose prints fool an electron microscope. Ninhydrin, superglue fuming, Bertillon and Pudd'nhead Wilson get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the science, its pioneers and its famous cases before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our forensic science, famous crimes and human body quizzes next.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What are the three basic fingerprint patterns in the Henry system?
Loop, whorl and arch
Loop, whorl and arch gave police a way to sort every set of prints into classes, so a clerk could track down one person's card among thousands without knowing a name.
Q 02A fingerprint left at the scene was one of the only clues when which Louvre painting was stolen in 1911?
Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa stayed missing for more than two years despite that print. The thief, a former Louvre workman, was caught only when he offered the painting to an art dealer in Florence.
Q 03A loop that starts on the little-finger side of the finger is called what?
Ulnar
Ulnar loops are named for the ulna, the forearm bone that runs down the little-finger side of the arm. They are also the most common fingerprint pattern of all.
Q 04Why do identical twins have different fingerprints despite sharing the same DNA?
Each grew differently in the womb
Each grew differently in the womb: tiny differences in pressure and timing while the skin forms shape every fingertip separately, which is why even one person's ten fingers never match.
Q 05What is the name for the raised skin that leaves a fingerprint?
Friction ridges
Friction ridges also sharpen the sense of touch: as a fingertip strokes a surface they amplify the tiny vibrations, helping nerves deep in the skin to read fine textures.
Q 06What is a chance fingerprint that is invisible to the naked eye called?
A latent print
A latent print is strictly one that nobody can see until powder or chemicals bring it out, though police tend to use the word loosely for any print found at a crime scene.
Q 07A Chicago jury convicted Thomas Jennings of murder in 1910 after he left fingerprints on a railing coated in what?
Fresh paint
Fresh paint on a porch railing kept his prints, and police cut the rail away as evidence. When Illinois's top court upheld the verdict, it set the precedent for fingerprints in American trials.
Q 08Which glands secrete most of the watery residue left behind by a fingertip?
Eccrine
Eccrine glands open on the fingertips themselves, while the oily part of a print is borrowed: it rubs off on the fingers each time a hand touches the face or hair.
Q 09Which reagent turns amino acids in a fingerprint deep purple?
Ninhydrin
Ninhydrin was first made by accident in 1910 and soon betrayed the fingerprints of any chemist who handled a test paper, yet police did not take it up until 1954.
Q 10Fumes of which household glue are used to reveal prints on glass and plastic?
Superglue
Superglue fumes react with the traces a fingertip leaves and harden into a white outline of the print. The same glue was sprayed on wounds in the Vietnam War to slow soldiers' bleeding until they reached hospital.
Q 11How are prints lifted from a nonporous surface after dusting with powder?
With transparent tape
With transparent tape pressed over the dusted print, the powder pattern peels away whole. Paper soaks a print up instead, so it is treated with chemicals, not dusted.
Q 12What is the technique for recording fingerprints digitally on a glass plate called?
Live scan
Live scan needs no ink or paper: the prints are captured electronically and sent straight to a central database, which checks them against its files automatically.
Q 13In which ancient city were fingerprints already being used to seal business contracts?
Babylon
Q 21Who published the statistical model of fingerprint identification in the 1892 book Finger Prints?
Francis Galton
Francis Galton took up fingerprints hoping they would reveal a person's character and ancestry. He found they showed neither, only that no two were alike.
Q 22Which Argentine police officer created the first system for filing individuals' fingerprints in 1892?
Juan Vucetich
His system was adopted across South America.
Q 23Which kind of medical treatment can erase a patient's fingerprints, as one traveller stopped at the US border found out?
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy with one common drug can make the fingertips peel until the prints are gone. A Singapore man on it was held for hours by US immigration, and his doctor urged other patients to carry a letter.
Babylon's traders pressed a fingertip into the wet clay of a tablet to seal a deal, many centuries before any scientist took an interest in the patterns.
Q 14Under which Chinese dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago, did investigators record handprints as evidence at burglary scenes?
Qin
Qin officials had a written guide to investigating burglaries that counted handprints at the scene as evidence. In the same era a document was sealed with clay bearing its author's fingerprint, as proof of who had sent it.
Q 15Which professor of anatomy at Bologna described the patterns on human fingertips in the 1680s?
Marcello Malpighi
Marcello Malpighi was among the first to turn the newly invented microscope on the human body, and a layer of the skin still carries his name.
Q 16Which anatomist, namesake of brain cells, named nine fingerprint patterns?
Jan Evangelista Purkyně
Jan Evangelista Purkyně gave each of the nine patterns a name and went no further: nowhere in his thesis did he suggest that fingerprints could tell one person from another.
Q 17Where did Sir William Herschel start using fingerprints on contracts in 1858?
Bengal, India
Bengal, India, is where Herschel had a road contractor press his whole hand onto a deal, simply to scare the man out of ever denying his own signature.
Q 18Which Scottish surgeon working in Tokyo published the first paper on fingerprints for identification in 1880?
Henry Faulds
Henry Faulds grew curious after spotting finger marks on fragments of ancient Japanese pottery, and went on to suggest catching criminals by the prints they left behind.
Q 19A Scottish doctor's 1880 letter on fingerprints and crime appeared in which journal?
Nature
Nature ran the letter in October 1880. In it the doctor told how a greasy fingermark had already shown him who had been helping themselves to some spirits.
Q 20Which naturalist did a Scottish doctor in Tokyo ask to promote his fingerprint work?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin, by then in his seventies, declined to take it up himself, but he did pass the letter on to a cousin who went on to study fingerprints.
Q 24What did Argentina become the first country to do after the Rojas case?
File criminal records by prints alone
It abolished Bertillon's body-measurement system for identifying criminals.
Q 25Which Frenchman's anthropometry system, based on body measurements, did fingerprints replace?
Alphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon's measurements were dropped within a few decades, but one part of his method outlived them: he standardised the mug shot, with its front and side views.
Q 26At which city's 1904 World's Fair did a Scotland Yard officer begin teaching American police to take fingerprints?
St. Louis
St. Louis had a Scotland Yard man, John Ferrier, on duty at the fair. He showed visiting police chiefs what fingerprints could do, then stayed on in America to teach the method.
Q 27In a famous 1903 story, fingerprints told apart two lookalike inmates, both named West, at which American prison?
Leavenworth
Leavenworth's clerks are said to have found that the two Wests matched in face and body measurements, but not in their prints. Later research suggests the pair were probably related, perhaps even twins.
Q 28Who took charge in 1924 of the US government's new central file of more than 800,000 fingerprint cards?
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover merged two collections: the federal government's own cards and those America's police chiefs had gathered. The chiefs themselves had lobbied the Justice Department for a single national file.
Q 29Which post did Edward Henry hold from 1903 to 1918?
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was where the fingerprint system named after him took Henry, though two of his sub-inspectors, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, are credited with working most of it out.
Q 30In 1912 a man shot fingerprint pioneer Edward Henry outside his London home after being refused a licence to do what?
Drive a taxi
Drive a taxi. Henry survived, asked the court to go easy on his attacker and, when the man came out of prison ten years later, paid his fare to a new life in Canada.