Human Anatomy
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138 free Human Anatomy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
10 free Human Anatomy trivia questions with answers. Human Anatomy trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Anatomy trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01How many bones are typically found in the adult human body?
206
206 is the usual adult count, but none of it is inert: bone is living tissue that the body keeps breaking down and rebuilding throughout life.
Q 02What is the folded outer layer of grey matter covering the brain called?
Cerebral cortex
The cerebral cortex is only 2 to 4 mm thick, so its folds are what let such a large sheet of it fit inside the skull.
Q 03Which is the thickest and strongest tendon in the human body?
Achilles tendon
The Achilles tendon ties the calf muscles to the heel bone and is named after the Greek hero Achilles, who in legend could be wounded only in the heel.
Q 04Which organ in the throat is commonly known as the voice box?
The larynx
The larynx houses the vocal cords; at puberty its front wall grows more prominent in boys, forming the bump known as the Adam's apple.
Q 05Which blood type is the 'universal recipient', able to receive red cells from every ABO and Rh group?
AB positive
AB positive red cells already carry the A, B and Rh antigens, so nothing in a donor's red cells looks foreign to the immune system; O negative is the reverse, the universal donor.
Q 06Which gland is often referred to as the 'master gland' of the endocrine system?
Pituitary gland
The pituitary gland is only pea-sized, and the 'master' has a master of its own: it releases its hormones on orders from the hypothalamus, the brain region just above it.
Q 07What is the collective name for the three membranes, the dura, arachnoid and pia mater, that wrap the brain?
Meninges
The meninges are what meningitis inflames, which is why a stiff neck is one of its warning signs.
Q 08Which artery carries oxygen-poor blood away from the heart?
Pulmonary artery
The pulmonary artery runs from the right ventricle to the lungs for a refill; the real rule is that arteries carry blood away from the heart, not that they carry oxygen.
Q 09Which butterfly-shaped gland at the front of the throat sets the pace of the body's metabolism?
The thyroid
The thyroid cannot make its hormones without iodine, which is why table salt is iodised: where diets lack iodine, the gland swells into a goitre.
Q 10Which heart chamber has the thickest muscular wall?
Left ventricle
The left ventricle has the thickest wall because it must drive blood round the whole body, while the right ventricle only has to reach the lungs next door.
Q 11A newborn has dozens more bones than an adult because many of them later do what?
Fuse together
They fuse together: a baby's skull, for one, starts as separate plates joined by soft gaps, the fontanelles, which let the head flex during birth before the bones knit.
Q 12The skull, spine and rib cage together make up which part of the skeleton?
The axial division
The axial division's 80 bones form the body's central column and guard the brain, spinal cord, heart and lungs; the limbs and their girdles hang from it.
Q 13What name is shared by the bones of the fingers and the bones of the toes?
Phalanges
Q 21Which is the shortest of the three regions of the small intestine?
The duodenum
The duodenum is only about 25 cm long, and its name says so: it comes from the Latin for 'twelve each', after its length of about twelve finger-widths.
Q 22Which finger-like projections lining the small intestine are named from the Latin for 'shaggy hair'?
Villi
Villi, Latin for 'shaggy hairs', carpet the gut wall so thickly that it looks like velvet, a word that grew from the same Latin root.
Q 23Roughly how many neurons does the human brain contain?
About 86 billion
About 86 billion, by a 2009 count that broke brain tissue down and tallied its cells directly; textbooks had long quoted a round 100 billion.
Phalanges share their name with soldiers: the Greeks used one word, phalanx, for a line of battle and for these bones, which sit in rows like ranks; thumbs and big toes have two each, other digits three.
Q 14In adults, where are almost all new blood cells made?
The bone marrow
The bone marrow is the body's blood-cell factory; donors give theirs through a needle into the hip bone, one of the main sites where adults keep active marrow.
Q 15Vesalius corrected Galen's claim that which body part was made of two bones rather than one?
The lower jaw
Galen, who dissected animals, described a two-part lower jaw; Vesalius showed in De humani corporis fabrica (1543) that the human mandible is a single bone.
Q 16The stapes, the smallest bone in the body, is named after its resemblance to what?
A stirrup
A stirrup: 'stapes' is a medieval Latin coinage, because stirrups reached Europe only centuries after ancient Rome and classical Latin had no word for one.
Q 17The topmost vertebra, which carries the skull, is named after which figure of Greek myth?
Atlas
Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens, gave his name to the bone that holds up the head; the joint it forms with the skull is what lets you nod.
Q 18Forensic scientists often estimate a person's height from which bone, the longest in the body?
The femur
The femur makes up about a quarter of a person's height in both sexes, so a single thigh bone is enough to estimate how tall its owner stood.
Q 19Which skull bone houses the inner ear within its dense petrous part?
The temporal bone
The temporal bone's petrous part is so dense that ancient DNA survives in it far better than elsewhere in a skeleton, which makes it the first bone geneticists reach for.
Q 20What name is given to the waves of muscle contraction that push food along the digestive tract?
Peristalsis
Peristalsis is strong enough to work against gravity: food and drink you swallow will still reach your stomach if you are standing on your head.
Q 24The brain is only about 2% of body weight, yet it uses roughly what share of the body's oxygen?
20%
It also takes 15% of cardiac output and a quarter of the body's glucose.
Q 25What is the largest of the nerve tracts connecting the brain's two hemispheres?
The corpus callosum
The corpus callosum bundles at least 200 million nerve fibres between the hemispheres; severing it to treat epilepsy produced the famous 'split-brain' patients.
Q 26Which lobe at the back of the brain is devoted mainly to processing vision?
Occipital lobe
The occipital lobe does the actual seeing: damage to it can leave a person blind even though both eyes are perfectly healthy.
Q 27Which layer of the body's outer covering contains no blood vessels at all?
The epidermis
The epidermis has no blood vessels at all, and its outer cells do not need them for oxygen: they take it straight from the surrounding air.
Q 28The stratum lucidum, a clear extra layer found only in the body's 'thick skin', occurs where?
The palms and soles
The palms and soles alone have this layer, whose dead, flattened cells are packed with a clear protein that makes them look see-through under the microscope, hence 'lucidum'.
Q 29Which protein in the dermis lets skin stretch and then snap back into shape?
Elastin
Elastin fibres in the dermis give skin its recoil; as they dwindle with age and are damaged by years of sun, skin sags and wrinkles.
Q 30Which part of the eye does most of its focusing, more than the lens itself?
The cornea
The cornea does most of the eye's focusing and the lens only fine-tunes it, which is why laser surgery corrects sight by reshaping the cornea.