Hyena Trivia
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49 free Hyena trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This hyena trivia quiz starts by fixing what most people get wrong: hyenas are feliforms, closer to cats and civets than dogs, and the spotted hyena kills up to 95% of what it eats rather than scavenging. It covers all four living species (spotted, striped, brown and the termite-eating aardwolf), the female-dominated clan, the pseudo-penis, cubs born with open eyes and teeth, the 'laugh', bone-crushing jaws, rabies resistance, and how hyenas beat chimpanzees at a cooperation test. It also covers the hyena in human imagination: Aristotle's slanders, the hermaphrodite myth, werehyenas and the Bouda, witches riding hyenas in Tanzania, the hyena-feeders of Harar, Shakespeare's 'laugh like a hyen', the man-eaters of Malawi, and the biologist who sued Disney over The Lion King. Evolution questions cover the dog-like hyenas, the elephant-bone-splintering Pachycrocuta and the one hyena that reached North America. Every question was verified against a primary reference (mainly the Wikipedia articles on the hyena family and its species) and carries a citation.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What gives a hyena its distinctive sloping back?
Front legs longer than its hind legs
Front legs longer than its hind legs: the high shoulders carry a powerful neck, built for tearing a carcass apart and carrying off the pieces.
Q 02Hyenas are more closely related to which animals, despite looking dog-like?
Cats and civets
Cats and civets: hyenas sit on the cat side of the carnivore family tree, and only came to look like dogs because they too run prey down and catch it with their teeth.
Q 03Spotted hyena cubs are born what colour, only gaining their spots at two to three months?
Almost black
Almost black: the dark birth coat lightens into the spotted adult pattern over the first months, and the spots then fade again as the animal ages.
Q 04Roughly how many termites can an aardwolf, the insect-eating hyena, lick up in a single night?
300,000
300,000: it licks them up with a long, sticky tongue and never wrecks the mound or eats the whole colony, so the termites rebuild and it can come back for more.
Q 05The aardwolf, a small termite-eating hyena, takes its name from Afrikaans words meaning what?
Earth-wolf
Earth-wolf, from aarde and wolf: it sleeps the day away in burrows underground and only comes out at night to feed.
Q 06In spotted hyena society, which sex is larger and dominant?
Females
Females: rank passes from mother to cub, so the daughter of a top female outranks adults below her mother.
Q 07What is unusual about the female spotted hyena's anatomy?
Her genitals closely resemble a male's
Her genitals closely resemble a male's: she urinates, mates and gives birth through a 'pseudo-penis', which is why the ancients took hyenas for hermaphrodites.
Q 08Spotted hyenas, which kill most of what they eat, usually bring down wildebeest and zebra how?
After a long chase
After a long chase: they run through a herd to pick out one animal, then wear it down over several kilometres, relying on stamina rather than surprise.
Q 09A spotted hyena community is called what?
A clan
A clan: its members share one territory and one den, yet they spend most of their time apart in small shifting groups, so the whole clan is rarely seen together.
Q 10Scientists say spotted hyena society is unlike any other carnivore's and most resembles that of which animals?
Baboons and macaques
Baboons and macaques: like those monkeys, spotted hyenas live in big ranked groups and keep track of who outranks whom among relatives and unrelated group-mates alike.
Q 11How are spotted hyena cubs unusual at birth among carnivorous mammals?
Born with eyes open and teeth erupted
Born with eyes open and teeth erupted: after that head start they are slow to grow up, nursing for over a year on some of the richest milk of any land carnivore.
Q 12What do newborn spotted hyena twins often do soon after birth?
Attack each other
Attack each other: the fights are fiercest between twins of the same sex, and can end with the weaker cub dead.
Q 13Which hormones do high-ranking spotted hyena mothers pass to unborn cubs, making them more aggressive?
Male sex
Q 21What do striped and brown hyenas often do when attacked by larger predators or dogs?
Feign death
Feign death: a striped hyena can lie limp for a long time, even while it is being bitten, whereas the spotted hyena fights back ferociously.
Q 22The brown hyena's Afrikaans nickname, strandwolf, comes from its habit of scavenging where?
Along the seashore
Along the seashore: 'strand' means beach, and on Namibia's desert coast brown hyenas patrol the tideline for washed-up carcasses and stray fur seal pups.
Q 23The IUCN's 2015 Red List placed the spotted hyena in which category?
Least Concern
Least Concern: with an estimated 27,000 to 47,000 animals it is Africa's most numerous large predator, though it is declining outside protected areas.
Male sex hormones: late in pregnancy a dominant mother's androgen levels run higher than a subordinate's, and her cubs of both sexes grow up pushier for it.
Q 14In a cooperative rope-pulling test, spotted hyenas outperformed which animals?
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees: captive hyena pairs worked out how to tug two ropes in unison with no training at all, a trick that chimps often need long coaching to learn.
Q 15When threatened, an aardwolf makes itself look far bigger than it is by doing what?
Raising a mane along its back
Raising a mane along its back: the bristling crest gave the animal both its Afrikaans nickname, 'mane-jackal', and its scientific name, cristata, 'crested'.
Q 16Serengeti spotted hyenas were found carrying which usually deadly virus for years with no sign of illness?
Rabies
Rabies: hyenas followed for up to 13 years carried the virus in their saliva on and off, yet none fell ill and they lived as long as the rest.
Q 17Hyenas are icons of Africa today, but the family first arose on which landmass?
Eurasia
Eurasia: its earliest hyenas were small omnivores, and the heavy bone-crushers came millions of years later.
Q 18Chasmaporthetes, the only hyena to reach North America, was built like which cat?
Cheetah
Cheetah: this 'running hyena' crossed the Bering land bridge and hunted by speed, perhaps because bone-crushing dogs already held the scavenger's place in America.
Q 19The giant hyena Pachycrocuta may have dragged which early humans into its cave?
Peking Man
Peking Man: the Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing was a hyena lair for millennia, so the fossils once read as a human home may be the leftovers of the hyenas' meals.
Q 20How do hyenas mark the borders of their territories?
By pasting anal-gland secretions on grass
By pasting anal-gland secretions on grass: bacteria living in the gland are thought to give each group's paste a smell of its own.
Q 24Outside Africa, the striped hyena's range runs through the Middle East and Central Asia as far east as where?
India
India: the striped hyena is the only hyena living outside Africa today, which is why it is the hyena of the Bible and of Middle Eastern folklore.
Q 25Across the Middle East, the striped hyena has long been reviled as a robber of what?
Graves
Graves: it will dig up buried bodies, which is why stones were traditionally piled on fresh graves in Turkey, and the charge has seen it hunted out of whole regions.
Q 26Pound for pound, which animal out-bites the spotted hyena and every other living carnivore tested?
The Tasmanian devil
The Tasmanian devil: for its size the hyena's bite turned out to be nothing special, so cracking bones evidently does not take extreme jaw-muscle force.
Q 27A spotted hyena's long-distance contact call, which can carry for several kilometres, is known as what?
The whoop
The whoop: it keeps scattered group-mates in touch across the dark, whereas the famous giggle is a close-range sound of fear or excitement, often from an animal being chased.
Q 28What does the pitch of a spotted hyena's laugh indicate?
How old it is
How old it is: the pitch of a giggle gives away the caller's age, and how much the notes vary tells listeners whether it is a dominant or a subordinate animal.
Q 29Which African people traditionally left their dead out for spotted hyenas rather than bury them?
The Maasai
The Maasai: they have little love for an animal that raids their livestock, yet by tradition they relied on it as their undertaker.
Q 30In Tanzania, witches are traditionally believed to use spotted hyenas as what?
Mounts
Mounts: witches are said to ride them by night, and in the Mtwara Region a child born while a hyena is crying is expected to grow up a thief.