Gecko Trivia
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46 free Gecko trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Geckos are the most species-rich group of lizards, with close to 2,000 kinds, and they do a lot of things other lizards cannot: chirp and bark, see colour in near-darkness, lick their own eyeballs clean, and walk across ceilings on feet covered in millions of microscopic hairs. This quiz covers the physics of that famous grip, why most geckos have no eyelids, how often they replace their teeth, and how the word 'gecko' itself is an imitation of a lizard's call. It also visits the species people actually meet: the leopard gecko sometimes called the first domesticated lizard, the loud and bad-tempered tokay, the crested gecko that was thought extinct until 1994, the house geckos that hunt around porch lights, the New Caledonian giant, the Jaragua sphaero that fits on a US quarter, and the Cockney-accented gecko who sells car insurance on American television. Easy questions ask about eyelids and tails; hard ones want seta counts, adhesion forces and a Greek myth. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on geckos and the species involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Lizards and Reptiles quizzes go wider if you want more.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the only continent with no native geckos?
Antarctica
Antarctica is simply too cold: geckos cannot make their own body heat, so they need warm surroundings to move, feed and breed.
Q 02Geckos of the genus Geckolepis escape a predator's grip by shedding what, leaving it with a useless mouthful?
Their scales
Their scales, the largest of any gecko's, tear away at the lightest touch, so the attacker is left holding a mouthful of scales while the bare-skinned gecko slips off.
Q 03Geckos stand out among lizards for which ability?
Making vocalisations
Making vocalisations sets geckos apart: most lizards are silent, but geckos chirp, click and bark to one another. The word 'gecko' itself is said to imitate the cry of one Asian species.
Q 04Most geckos have no eyelids, just a fixed clear scale over each eye, a feature they share with which other reptiles?
Snakes
Snakes have the same see-through 'spectacle' in place of eyelids, which is why neither animal can blink. A snake even sheds the scale along with the rest of its skin.
Q 05How do eyelid-less geckos keep their eyes clean and moist?
They lick them
They lick them: the clear scale over each eye is really a pair of eyelids fused shut and turned transparent, so a gecko cannot blink and wipes its eyes with its tongue instead.
Q 06In 2014, Russia launched five geckos into orbit to study how weightlessness affects what?
Their mating
Their mating was the subject, but the mission went wrong: ground control lost contact with the satellite for days, and all five geckos were found dead when it landed.
Q 07House geckos are welcome lodgers in many tropical homes because they eat what?
Insect pests
Insect pests are the rent they pay: house geckos wait near lamps at night and pick off the moths and mosquitoes that the light draws in.
Q 08The western banded gecko is native to the deserts of which country?
United States
United States deserts, the Mojave and the Sonoran, are its home, along with north-west Mexico. It is an oddity among geckos: it has movable eyelids and can blink.
Q 09Which web browser runs on a rendering engine called Gecko?
Firefox
Firefox inherited Gecko from Netscape, where work on the engine began in 1997. Netscape's own browser faded away, but its engine lives on inside Firefox.
Q 10What do many geckos do with their shed skin?
Eat it
Eat it is exactly what they do: a shedding gecko tugs the loose skin off with its mouth and swallows it. In some species a hatchling will not touch other food until it has eaten its first shed.
Q 11Geckos' climbing grip arose separately in about eleven lineages, a textbook case of which process?
Convergent evolution
Convergent evolution means unrelated lineages arriving at the same solution. Geckos gained the grip about eleven times and, more surprisingly, lost it again about nine times.
Q 12Gecko adhesion was long credited to which weak intermolecular attraction?
Van der Waals forces
Van der Waals forces are feeble pulls between molecules that almost touch. A gecko multiplies them across millions of microscopic contact points, though one 2014 study argued that static charge does more of the work.
Q 13To show off a new 'gecko tape' in 2003, scientists hung which superhero toy from a sheet of glass?
Q 21The most commonly kept pet gecko cannot climb vivarium glass because it lacks what?
Sticky toe pads
Sticky toe pads are missing in the leopard gecko and in roughly four out of every ten gecko species. It is a ground-dweller from dry, rocky country, with no need to run up walls.
Q 22In Greek myth, Demeter turned the boy Ascalabus into a gecko for what offence?
Mocking her as she drank
Mocking her as she drank was the boy's mistake. The goddess, parched from searching for her lost daughter, was gulping down a drink when he laughed at her, and she flung the dregs over him.
Q 23The leopard gecko is sometimes described as the first lizard species to be what?
Domesticated
Spider-Man
Spider-Man dangled by one hand coated in the tape, whose plastic pillars copied the structures on a gecko's foot. The team's leader, Andre Geim, later won a Nobel Prize for discovering graphene.
Q 14How does a gecko unstick its foot to take the next step?
It peels its toes backwards
It peels its toes backwards from the tips, the way you would peel off sticky tape. The grip lets go a little at a time, so very little force is needed.
Q 15A gecko clings to glass without suction, using millions of microscopic what on its feet?
Tiny hairs
Tiny hairs, each about a tenth the width of a human hair and split into hundreds of finer tips, cover the feet. Together they press so close to a surface that the molecules themselves attract.
Q 16What do tokay geckos do with their eggs until they hatch?
Stand guard over them
Stand guard over them: the female sticks her hard-shelled eggs to a solid base, and the adults keep watch beside them until the young hatch.
Q 17The mossy leaf-tailed gecko vanishes against a tree trunk by pressing what flat against the bark?
A fringe of skin
A fringe of skin runs along its head, body and legs. Pressed against the trunk by day, it wipes out the shadow that would otherwise give the gecko's outline away.
Q 18Geckos regrow each of their 100 or so teeth every few months, a trick also seen in which animals?
Sharks
Sharks and geckos are both polyphyodonts, animals whose teeth are replaced again and again for life. Beside each working gecko tooth, a small spare is already growing.
Q 19The oldest known fossils of modern geckos are preserved in amber from which country?
Myanmar
Myanmar's amber is about 100 million years old, so geckos much like today's were already climbing trees while dinosaurs walked below. The same deposits have yielded fragments of dinosaurs themselves.
Q 20Pygopods, legless lizards that are geckos, live almost entirely in which country?
Australia
Australia's pygopods have lost their front legs entirely and kept only small flaps where the hind legs were, which is why they are also known as flap-footed lizards.
Domesticated is the claim: leopard geckos have been bred in captivity for so many generations that breeders now offer colours and patterns never seen in the wild.
Q 24The leopard gecko is native to dry regions of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Nepal and which other country?
India
India's dry north-west completes the range. Winters there can fall below 10 °C, so wild leopard geckos retreat underground and sit out the cold in a dormancy called brumation.
Q 25In leopard geckos, what decides whether an egg hatches as a male or a female?
The temperature of the nest
The temperature of the nest settles it in the first weeks: warm, middling temperatures produce mostly males, while cooler or very hot nests produce females.
Q 26A healthy leopard gecko has a thick tail because it uses the tail to store what?
Fat
Fat in the tail is an emergency larder that carries the gecko through lean spells. A gecko that loses its tail loses those savings too.
Q 27Why does a leopard gecko's dropped tail keep thrashing for up to half an hour?
To distract predators
To distract predators: while the attacker goes for the flipping, wriggling tail, the gecko slips away. Built-in fracture lines let the tail snap off cleanly with almost no bleeding.
Q 28Mourning geckos are almost all female; how do they produce young without males?
By cloning themselves
By cloning themselves: their eggs develop without being fertilised, a process called parthenogenesis, so each daughter is a near-copy of her mother.
Q 29In bright light, a tokay gecko's pupils narrow to which shape?
A vertical slit
A vertical slit shields eyes that are built for the dark. In many geckos its edges are scalloped, so when the slit closes fully only a few pinpoints of light get through.
Q 30Tokay geckos are poached in large part for use in what?
Traditional medicine
Traditional medicine in China uses dried tokays under the name Ge Jie, although no medical benefit has been shown. The trade grew large enough for the species to be listed under the CITES wildlife treaty.