Fossils Trivia
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100 free Fossils trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A fossil is any preserved remains, impression or trace of a once-living thing from a past geological age, from micrometre-wide bacteria to an 88-metre petrified sequoia. The word comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, and the oldest known fossils are around 3.5 billion years old. This quiz covers how fossils form, from permineralization and pyritization to casts, molds and amber, the difference between body and trace fossils, index fossils and biostratigraphy, radiometric dating, the ancient myths fossils inspired, Steno, Hooke, William Smith, Cuvier and Mary Anning, and oddities like coprolites, Lagerstätten and pseudofossils. About a third of the questions are classroom-easy, a third are medium and the rest are for rockhounds. Every answer is checked against reference paleontology pages.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word fossil comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Obtained by digging
Obtained by digging. In the 1600s a fossil was anything dug out of the ground, coal and salt included; the word narrowed to the remains of ancient life only in the 1730s.
Q 02What is the scientific study of fossils called?
Paleontology
Paleontology. As a science it began in the 1790s with a startling proof drawn from fossil skeletons: whole species, the mammoth among them, had vanished for good.
Q 03Specimens are sometimes only counted as fossils once they are older than roughly what age?
10,000 years
10,000 years. The line is a convention, and nothing says a fossil must have turned to stone: a mammoth preserved in ice counts, while younger remains are called subfossils.
Q 04About how old are the oldest widely accepted fossils on Earth?
3.5 billion years
3.5 billion years. Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, so life was under way about a billion years after the planet formed, and older chemical traces hint that it began earlier still.
Q 05Which technique, developed in the early 20th century, gives rocks an absolute age?
Radiometric dating
Radiometric dating. Radioactive elements decay at fixed, known rates, so the ratio of an element to its decay products works as a clock; it stretched Earth's age from Kelvin's 20 to 400 million years to billions.
Q 06The stone logs of Petrified Forest National Park, more than 200 million years old, lie in which US state?
Arizona
Arizona. Visitors who pocket a piece often mail it back with a letter of apology, some of them fearing a curse; rangers cannot tell where each rock came from, so it joins a 'conscience pile'.
Q 07What is the technical name for fossilized feces?
Coprolites
Coprolites. The name is Greek for 'dung stone', and a broken one can still hold the fish scales and bones of a meal eaten millions of years ago.
Q 08Footprints, burrows and droppings are classed as what kind of fossil?
Trace fossils
Trace fossils. They record what an animal did, not what it looked like, and some trails and burrows are older than any body fossil of a creature that could have made them.
Q 09Which mythical creature may have been inspired by Protoceratops skulls, according to Adrienne Mayor?
The griffin
The griffin. Mayor suggested Scythian gold miners met the beaked, four-legged skeletons in Central Asia; critics reply that the fossils lie hundreds of kilometres from any gold and that griffin art has an older history of its own.
Q 10What were the tongue stones, or glossopetra, described by Pliny the Elder?
Fossil shark teeth
Fossil shark teeth. Pliny thought they dropped from the sky, perhaps from the moon, and for centuries afterwards nobles wore them as charms against snakebite and poison.
Q 11Pliny the Elder named which coiled fossils after the ram's horns of an Egyptian god?
Ammonites
Ammonites. The god was Ammon, shown with a ram's horns; in English folklore the same fossils were snakes turned to stone, and dealers carved heads on them to help them sell.
Q 12Toadstones, once worn in rings as a charm against poison, were really the fossil teeth of what?
An extinct fish
An extinct fish. Its button-shaped teeth were thought to grow in the heads of living toads, and a toadstone ring was supposed to turn warm on the finger when poison was near.
Q 13The 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton nicknamed Lucy was found in 1974 in which country?
Ethiopia
Q 21Which British fossil hunter unearthed an ichthyosaur as a child and later the first complete plesiosaur?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning. The plesiosaur looked so odd that the leading anatomist in Paris took it for a fake, and the Geological Society met to discuss it without inviting her.
Q 22When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the oldest known animal fossils dated to which period?
Cambrian
Cambrian. Darwin called the lack of older fossils one of the gravest difficulties for his theory and hoped they would turn up; they since have, in far older rocks.
Q 23The Ediacara biota, about 575 million years old, are among the earliest known fossils of what?
Large, complex organisms
Ethiopia. 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' was playing in camp the night she was found, which gave her the name; her skeleton showed that our ancestors walked upright before their brains grew big.
Q 14In traditional Chinese medicine, fossil mammal remains have long been sold under what name?
Dragon bones
Dragon bones. Fossil hunters learned to search Chinese pharmacies for them, a trick that led to Peking Man, and in 1899 a scholar noticed that some carried ancient Chinese writing.
Q 15Which petrified plant, found in dry northern China, led the Song scholar Shen Kuo to suggest that climates change?
Bamboo
Bamboo. It could not grow in so dry a place in his own day, so he suggested the climate had once been different; he also read seashells in mountain rock as the mark of a vanished shoreline.
Q 16Fossil elephant skulls may have inspired which creatures of Greek myth?
The Cyclopes
The Cyclopes. The opening for the trunk sits in the middle of the skull like one giant eye socket; the link remains a conjecture.
Q 17In Danish folklore, fossil sea urchins were kept in the home as protective charms under what name?
Thunderstones
Thunderstones. Danes believed they fell from the heavens in storms and kept them on a shelf to protect the house from lightning, and even to stop the milk turning sour.
Q 18Which Danish anatomist argued in the 1660s that fossils were once living things, and worked out how rock layers form?
Nicholas Steno
Nicholas Steno. Within a few years of that work he gave up science altogether, became a Catholic priest and ended his life as a bishop.
Q 19Which English canal engineer formulated the principle of faunal succession?
William Smith
William Smith. He used the idea to draw his great 1815 geological map of England and Wales, went to debtors' prison four years later, and only late in life received the Geological Society's highest honour.
Q 20Which French naturalist concluded most fossils were extinct species and championed catastrophism?
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier. In 1796 he showed that mammoth bones belonged to no living elephant, and he became famous for rebuilding whole vanished animals from a handful of bones.
Large, complex organisms. Geologist Reg Sprigg noticed the soft-bodied imprints in 1946 while inspecting old mines, reportedly over lunch, and they showed that complex life was older than the first animals with shells.
Q 24Which English geologist first gave a scientific account of fossil droppings?
William Buckland
William Buckland. He made his case by comparing the stones with the dung of living hyenas, and he also wrote the first full account of a dinosaur, Megalosaurus.
Q 25Dating rocks by the fossils embedded in them is called what?
Biostratigraphy
Biostratigraphy. Each stretch of time has its own cast of species, so the same distinctive fossil found in two distant cliffs shows that their rocks are the same age.
Q 26Which pair of scientists proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972?
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. Eldredge had found that trilobite eyes stayed the same for millions of years and then changed abruptly, and the pair argued that such fits and starts are how species usually evolve.
Q 27Absolute dating of fossil-bearing rock usually relies on which kind of layer?
Volcanic ash
Volcanic ash. The beds that hold fossils usually cannot be dated directly, so geologists date ash layers above and below and bracket the fossil's age between them.
Q 28Nearly all fossils are found in which kind of rock?
Sedimentary
Sedimentary. Mud and sand settling over a body shield it from scavengers and decay, whereas the heat and pressure that make igneous and most metamorphic rock destroy any remains.
Q 29Fossil sites with exceptional preservation are known by what German term?
Lagerstätten
Lagerstätten. The German word means a storage place; the animals were usually buried fast in mud with no oxygen, so bacteria never got to work and even eyes and guts survived.
Q 30Which famous fossil site is in the Canadian Rockies?
Burgess Shale
Burgess Shale. Charles Walcott, head of the Smithsonian, found it in 1909 and kept coming back with his wife and children until he had quarried more than 65,000 specimens.