Forensic Science Trivia
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109 free Forensic Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This forensic science trivia quiz runs from the first recorded use of insects to solve a murder in 13th-century China to modern DNA databases. It covers the history (Song Ci's sickle case, the Marsh test for arsenic, Bertillon's body measurements, the first fingerprint bureau in Argentina), the science (why luminol glows, what a latent print is, which repeats DNA profiling actually reads) and the famous cases and people, including Colin Pitchfork, Frances Glessner Lee's dollhouse crime scenes and the Body Farm in Tennessee. The easy questions are ones any true-crime fan will know: what luminol reacts with, who is called the Sherlock Holmes of Lyon, what a polygraph measures. The hard ones dig into dates, names and numbers, such as how many local men gave blood in the first DNA manhunt and which techniques the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report criticised. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on forensic science, fingerprints, DNA profiling and the individual pioneers and cases, and each question links to its source. Good for students, pub quiz writers and anyone who watches too much CSI. Try our Sherlock Holmes and Serial Killers quizzes next.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word "forensic" comes from a Latin word meaning "of" what?
The forum
The forum. Roman trials and public hearings were held in the forum, and "forensics" still names the art of formal debate as well as crime-scene work.
Q 02The Washing Away of Wrongs, a 1240s handbook for coroners, was written in which country?
China
China. Song Ci, a Song dynasty judge, wrote what is widely regarded as the first treatise on forensic medicine, hoping careful examination of the dead would stop innocent people being condemned.
Q 03What gave a killer away when every man in a 13th-century village was told to lay out his sickle?
Flies gathered on his sickle
Flies gathered on his sickle, drawn by blood too faint to see, and its owner confessed. The case, written down in the 1240s, is the oldest known use of insects to solve a crime.
Q 04What did suspects in ancient India have to spit out as a crude lie-detection test?
Dried rice
Dried rice. A frightened liar was thought to make less saliva, so grains that came out dry or stuck in the mouth were read as a sign of guilt.
Q 05John Toms was convicted of murder in 1784 after a pistol wad matched what item in his pocket?
A torn newspaper
A torn newspaper. Pistols of the day needed a wad of crushed paper to hold powder and ball in the muzzle, and the wad taken from Edward Culshaw's head wound fitted the torn sheet exactly.
Q 06Wood expert Arthur Koehler matched a homemade ladder to a floorboard in the suspect's attic in which famous case?
The Lindbergh kidnapping
The Lindbergh kidnapping. Koehler showed that one rail of the ladder left at the house had been cut from a board in Bruno Hauptmann's attic, with nail holes that lined up with the joists.
Q 07The Marsh test of 1836 let chemists prove which poison, nicknamed 'inheritance powder', was present in a body?
Arsenic
Arsenic. James Marsh devised the test after a man accused of poisoning his grandfather's coffee was acquitted, because the chemical proof Marsh had prepared spoiled before the jury saw it.
Q 08Mathieu Orfila, royal physician to France's Louis XVIII, is often called the father of which forensic field?
Toxicology
Toxicology. Orfila's 1814 treatise on poisons showed how to find them chemically in a body, and courts began calling him as an expert, most famously at the Lafarge murder trial of 1840.
Q 09Ballistics pioneer Calvin Goddard test-fired police machine guns to clear officers of which gangland killing?
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Some of the gunmen had dressed as policemen, so Goddard tested the Chicago force's Thompsons and showed none was used; the jury foreman then paid for a crime laboratory for him.
Q 10Alphonse Bertillon's identification system was based on what?
Body measurements
Body measurements. In 1884 his cards of head and limb measurements caught more than 240 repeat offenders, and police forces across Europe and the Americas took up the system.
Q 11Bertillon's flawed handwriting evidence helped wrongly convict which famous defendant?
Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus. Bertillon was no handwriting expert, yet he told the court the captain had imitated his own handwriting to disguise the spy's note, a theory he called self-forgery.
Q 12Which animal has fingerprints so similar to a human's that they are hard to tell apart even under a microscope?
Koala
Koala. Marsupials and primates evolved their ridged fingertips separately, probably because both climb and grasp, so a koala's print shows the same loops and whorls as a person's.
Q 13Henry Faulds wrote the first paper on fingerprint identification in 1880 while running Tsukiji Hospital in which Japanese city?
Tokyo
Q 21Paul Uhlenhuth's 1901 precipitin test allowed investigators to distinguish what?
Human from animal blood
Human from animal blood. Its first big case, in 1901, convicted a German carpenter who had explained away the stains on his clothes as wood dye and cattle blood.
Q 22Luminol reveals hidden blood by reacting with what?
The iron in hemoglobin
The iron in hemoglobin. It acts as a catalyst for luminol's light-giving reaction, but bleach, copper and even horseradish can set it off too, so a glow alone never proves blood.
Q 23What colour does luminol glow when it reacts at a crime scene?
Blue
Tokyo. The Scottish missionary doctor grew curious after noticing potters' fingermarks pressed into prehistoric pottery, and his letter to Nature proposed using printing ink to record prints.
Q 14Francis Galton, who put the odds of two fingerprints matching at 1 in 64 billion, also coined which notorious term?
Eugenics
Eugenics. Galton coined the word in 1883 for his idea of improving humanity through selective breeding, a notion later used to justify forced sterilisation.
Q 15Croatian-born police official Juan Vucetich built the first working fingerprint files and solved a murder with them in 1892 in which country?
Argentina
Argentina. A bloody thumb mark on a door showed that Francisca Rojas, who had blamed a neighbour for killing her two children, was the murderer herself, and she confessed.
Q 16Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose helped devise the Henry fingerprint classification, named after their British police chief, in which Indian city?
Calcutta
Calcutta. Edward Henry carried the system to Scotland Yard under his own name; only in 1926 did he write that Haque had contributed more than any other member of his staff.
Q 17Fingerprints that are invisible to the naked eye and need chemical or powder development are called what?
Latent prints
Latent prints. They are left by the sweat and oils on a fingertip, which is why a fine powder brushed over the surface sticks to the ridges and shows the pattern.
Q 18Fumes from which household product make hidden fingerprints show up on guns and bottles?
Superglue
Superglue. Its fumes harden into a white film along the ridges, an effect a Japanese police examiner noticed by chance in 1977 while mounting hairs on a glass slide.
Q 19Identical twins have different fingerprints because the ridge patterns are shaped at which stage of life?
In the womb
In the womb. The ridges form from about the third month of pregnancy, and each finger's position and the pressures around it differ, so twins with the same DNA end up with different prints.
Q 20Being born without fingerprints is nicknamed 'immigration delay disease' after a woman struggled to enter which country?
The United States
The United States. Its border rules require foreign visitors to be fingerprinted, and when dermatologist Peter Itin looked into the Swiss woman's case in 2007 he found that several relatives had also been born without prints.
Blue. The light comes from a chemical reaction rather than heat and fades quickly, so investigators darken the room and photograph the glow straight away.
Q 24Which novelist studied law in Prague under Hans Gross, whose 1893 handbook pioneered scientific crime investigation?
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka. He sat through Gross's criminal-law lectures between 1902 and 1905, a decade before writing The Trial, whose hero is prosecuted without ever learning the charge.
Q 25Forensic linguistics helped the FBI catch which bomber after his own brother recognised turns of phrase in his published writing?
Ted Kaczynski
Ted Kaczynski. When the Unabomber's manifesto was printed in 1995, his brother David dug out family letters with similar phrasing, and the FBI's comparison of the two supported the search warrant for his cabin.
Q 26Edmond Locard is remembered for the principle that every contact leaves what?
A trace
A trace. Locard proved the point in 1912, when face powder scraped from under a bank clerk's fingernails broke his alibi for strangling his girlfriend.
Q 27Which part of an adult skeleton do forensic anthropologists rely on most to tell whether it was male or female?
The pelvis
The pelvis. A woman's is broader with a wider opening, shaped by the demands of childbirth, so examiners look there first and treat the skull as a less reliable second check.
Q 28Which staple of police work did French police official Alphonse Bertillon standardise in 1888?
The mug shot
The mug shot. Bertillon fixed the lighting and angles and paired a full-face view with a profile on every card, so that pictures of one person taken years apart could be compared.
Q 29Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are what?
Dollhouse crime scene dioramas
Dollhouse crime scene dioramas. Lee built them from the 1940s at a scale of one inch to the foot, as composites of real cases, so detectives could practise reading a death scene for clues.
Q 30Al Capone went to prison in 1931 after forensic accountants proved which crime against him?
Tax evasion
Tax evasion. Treasury agent Frank Wilson found three old ledgers at the back of a filing cabinet that tied gambling profits to Capone, and the gangster was sentenced to 11 years.