Grizzly Bears
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Grizzly Bears trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The grizzly bear is the heavyweight of the North American wilderness, an animal that inspires awe and fear in equal measure and stars in frontier tales, national park lore and Hollywood films. Yet much of what people think they know about grizzlies turns out to be wrong, starting with what the name actually means. This quiz covers the whole animal: what a grizzly looks like and how to tell it from a black bear, what it really eats, how it gets through the winter, where it lives today and where it has vanished. There are questions on staying safe in bear country, on conservation, and on the individual bears, books and movies that shaped the grizzly's reputation. It suits wildlife lovers, hikers, students and anyone warming up for a trivia night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'grizzly', often confused with 'grisly', is usually taken to describe what about the grizzly bear?
Its grey-tipped fur
The name points to its grey-tipped fur: 'grizzled' means streaked with grey. Early explorers spelled it 'grisley', which left room for both readings.
Q 02Grizzly bears belong to the order Carnivora, yet what may make up 80 to 90 percent of their diet?
Plants
Plants such as grasses, roots and berries dominate the menu, even though a grizzly has a carnivore's digestive system. Meat matters most where salmon or elk calves are easy to get.
Q 03A grizzly bear reliably clocked at 30 mph in Yellowstone would outrun which of these over a short dash?
An Olympic sprinter
An Olympic sprinter would lose: Usain Bolt's fastest recorded burst was just under 28 mph. A racing greyhound tops 40 mph and a pronghorn passes 50.
Q 04Which US state's flag shows a grizzly bear, although the state's last wild grizzlies vanished in the 1920s?
California
California put a grizzly on its flag, said to be modelled on Monarch, a bear caught in 1889 and kept in San Francisco. The state's last grizzly was reportedly shot in 1922.
Q 05What does the US National Park Service tell hikers to do if a grizzly bear attacks them?
Play dead
Play dead, lying flat on your stomach with your hands clasped behind your neck and your pack still on. With a black bear the advice flips: fight back.
Q 06What do female grizzly bears do in the winter den, partway through five to seven months of hibernation?
Give birth
They give birth, usually to twins, and the newborns nurse on rich milk while she fasts until spring. Mating happened months earlier, in the summer.
Q 07A 'pizzly', a hybrid first confirmed in the wild in 2006, is a grizzly crossed with which other animal?
Polar bear
A polar bear and a grizzly produced the pale animal shot on Banks Island in Canada's Arctic, as DNA tests proved. The hybrids are also called grolar bears.
Q 08A grizzly bear's bite, measured at over 1,100 psi, is often said to be strong enough to crush what?
A bowling ball
A bowling ball is the usual yardstick for the bite's eight megapascals of pressure. Even so, grizzlies use that bite mostly on roots, berries and carcasses.
Q 09Which insects do Yellowstone grizzly bears eat by the tens of thousands a day on high mountain slopes?
Moths
Moths, specifically army cutworm moths, can supply up to half of a Yellowstone bear's yearly calories. One bear may lick up 40,000 of the fat-rich insects in a single day.
Q 10The grizzly is a North American population of which species, also found from Scandinavia to Japan?
Brown bear
The brown bear, Ursus arctos, is a single species right around the Northern Hemisphere. Naturalists once split North America's grizzlies into as many as 86 species.
Q 11Which feature, absent in black bears, is the quickest way to recognise a grizzly bear from its outline?
A shoulder hump
A shoulder hump made entirely of muscle drives the forelegs, giving grizzlies extra force for digging. Other clues are a dished face and a rump lower than the shoulders.
Q 12Which grizzly bears are responsible for about 70 percent of the human deaths caused by grizzlies?
Mothers with cubs
Mothers with cubs attack to protect their young, not to feed. Most other maulings also begin with a bear surprised at very close range, often while it guards a food supply.
Q 13An adult female grizzly bear goes by which name, borrowed from the farmyard?
Sow
Q 21Which US state, whose university teams are the Grizzlies, made the grizzly bear its state animal in 1983?
Montana
Montana let its schoolchildren vote, and the grizzly won. The state also holds the largest grizzly population in the lower 48.
Q 22Which skill, easy for black bears, do adult grizzly bears largely lose because of their weight and long claws?
Climbing trees
Climbing trees gets hard as a grizzly's bulk increases and its claws grow long and blunt. Rather than flee upward as black bears do, an adult grizzly tends to stand its ground.
Q 23Until the 1970s, Yellowstone grizzly bears gathered to feed at which human-made sites inside the park?
Garbage dumps
Sow is the term, and an adult male is a boar, both borrowed from the farmyard. She usually raises her litter of one to four alone, for up to two years.
Q 14Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar for which 2015 film, in which a grizzly bear mauls his character?
The Revenant
The Revenant won DiCaprio the Best Actor award and Alejandro G. Iñárritu a second straight Best Director Oscar. The story grew out of a real mauling on the American frontier in 1823.
Q 15The NBA's Memphis Grizzlies kept their name after moving in 2001 from which Canadian city?
Vancouver
Vancouver's team was nearly called the Mounties, until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police objected. The Grizzlies joined the NBA in 1995 and left for Tennessee after six seasons.
Q 16Grizzly bears once ranged as far south as which country, where they were regarded as extinct by 1964?
Mexico
Mexico had its own silver-coated grizzly, known in Spanish as el oso plateado. Trapped, shot and poisoned for taking cattle, it was already scarce by the 1930s.
Q 17Which predator, returned to Yellowstone in 1995, often loses its elk kills to grizzly bears?
Gray wolf
The gray wolf pack often yields when a grizzly follows its nose to the carcass. One animal may distract the bear with nips at its hind legs while the rest snatch a meal.
Q 18Which Alaskan island's bears, cut off since the last ice age, grow larger than mainland grizzlies?
Kodiak
Kodiak bears have been isolated for at least 10,000 years, and a big male can stand nearly ten feet tall on its hind legs. Only one other bear on Earth rivals them for size.
Q 19Which explorers, crossing the American West in 1804–06, first described the grizzly, spelling it 'grisley'?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark's spelling left later readers unsure what the name was meant to say. Their expedition described more than 200 plant and animal species new to science.
Q 20Bear spray, carried by hikers in grizzly country, gets its burn from a chemical found in what?
Chili peppers
Chili peppers supply capsaicin, the irritant that makes up 1 to 2 percent of the spray. In an Alaskan study it stopped a bear's unwanted behaviour in 92 percent of cases.
Garbage dumps taught the bears to link people with food, which was bad for both. In 1970 the park began closing them and fitting bear-proof bins to return the animals to natural foods.
Q 24A newborn grizzly bear, tiny beside an adult male weighing a quarter of a ton, weighs roughly how much?
One pound
One pound, about 450 grams, is typical for a newborn. After two years at its parent's side it may weigh around 100 pounds.
Q 25Before settlers pushed them into the mountains, grizzly bears roamed which vast region east of the Rockies?
The Great Plains
The Great Plains were once grizzly country, as were the southwestern states. Counting Canada and the United States together, grizzlies now occupy about half of their historical range.
Q 26Under which US law were grizzly bears in the lower 48 states listed as threatened in 1975?
Endangered Species Act
The Endangered Species Act made it illegal to harm, harass or kill them except in self-defence. By then only 700 to 800 grizzlies were left south of Canada.
Q 27When a grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs near a hiker, what is it usually doing?
Looking and sniffing
Looking and sniffing is the point: the bear stands to get a better view and smell of whatever it has noticed. Park rangers call a standing bear curious, not threatening.
Q 28Ancestors of the grizzly bear reached North America from Eurasia across which Ice Age land bridge?
Beringia
Beringia linked Siberia and Alaska when ice-age sea levels fell, letting the bears walk across. Later waves from Eurasia repopulated Alaska after the last glacial peak.
Q 29The 1976 horror film Grizzly, about a man-eating bear in a national forest, was seen as copying which hit?
Jaws
Jaws had been a huge success the year before, and Grizzly reused many of its plot devices. In place of the shark it offered a bear said to stand 18 feet tall.
Q 30Two fatal grizzly bear attacks on one August night in 1967 struck campers in which US national park?
Glacier
Glacier had recorded no fatal bear attack in its 57-year history before that night. The two separate deaths led to the first modern bear management rules.