Jane Goodall Trivia
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48 free Jane Goodall trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream in July 1960 with no degree, a notebook and her mother, and spent the next six decades rewriting what we thought we knew about chimpanzees: that they make tools, hunt meat, wage war and have personalities worth naming. This quiz covers her whole life, from the toy chimpanzee her father gave her as a girl to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025. Easy questions ask which animal she studied, where Gombe is and who Louis Leakey was. Harder ones dig into the chimp who first trusted her, the Cambridge rule she was only the eighth person to bend, the youth programme born on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, the Far Side cartoon that her institute called an atrocity, the Stevie Nicks song written about her, and the two Simpsons episodes she is connected to. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Jane Goodall, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for science teachers, conservationists and quiz hosts who want more than "she liked chimps". Related quizzes: our Animals, Nature and Famous Scientists pages.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fictional hero did Goodall say she fell passionately in love with as a girl?
Tarzan
Tarzan won her heart in second-hand books, and she joked ever after that he had married the wrong Jane; reading them, she resolved to go to Africa and live among wild animals.
Q 02In which country is Gombe Stream National Park, the site of Goodall's research?
Tanzania
Tanzania did not yet exist when she stepped ashore in 1960: Gombe was then a small game reserve in a British-run territory, and only later became a national park.
Q 03Which palaeontologist mentored Goodall and sent her to Gombe in 1960?
Louis Leakey
Louis Leakey believed living great apes could hint at how early humans behaved, and he chose her precisely because she had no degree: he wanted a mind unbiased by the theories of the day.
Q 04What job was Goodall first offered when she telephoned a famous fossil hunter in Kenya in 1957?
Secretary
Secretary: he hired her at his Nairobi museum on the spot, then took her fossil-digging at Olduvai Gorge, and only later revealed that he wanted someone to watch wild apes.
Q 05What set apart the Netflix interview with Goodall that was released in October 2025?
It was held back until she died
It was held back until she died: Famous Last Words films its guests in secret on the promise that nothing airs in their lifetime, and Goodall, the first of them to die, opened the series.
Q 06In which south-coast English resort did Goodall grow up and keep her family home for life?
Bournemouth
Bournemouth stayed her base to the end: even while away most of each year, she kept coming back to the house she had grown up in, which she shared with her sister Judy.
Q 07Who accompanied Goodall to Gombe in 1960 to satisfy the chief warden's safety concerns?
Her mother
Her mother stayed for the first months and, Goodall recalled, won the neighbours over by running a simple clinic, handing out aspirin and bandages to the fishermen camped along the shore.
Q 08From which university did Goodall earn her PhD in ethology?
Cambridge
Cambridge admitted her in 1962 although she had never taken a first degree, making her only the eighth person the university had let go straight to a doctorate.
Q 09Goodall arrived at Gombe in 1960 with no scientific training, a notebook and which other piece of equipment?
A pair of binoculars
A pair of binoculars was all she had to work with: the apes fled whenever she came near, so for months she could only watch from far off, until one male lost his fear of her.
Q 10What did Goodall see a chimpanzee doing with grass stalks in her famous 1960 tool-use discovery?
Fishing for termites
Fishing for termites: he poked grass stems into the insects' nest and ate the ones that clung on, and others stripped the leaves from twigs to make better probes, which counted as toolmaking.
Q 11Which primate did Goodall watch the Gombe chimps hunt and eat, disproving their vegetarian image?
Colobus monkeys
Colobus monkeys are hunted by teamwork: some chimps block the escape routes through the treetops while another climbs up to make the kill, and the meat is shared with those who beg for it.
Q 12What was the name of the male chimpanzee who was the first to lose his fear of Goodall?
David Greybeard
David Greybeard wandered into her camp to feed on a palm tree, kept coming back and one day took food from her hand; it was he, she said, who let her into the apes' world.
Q 13What was unconventional about how Goodall identified the animals she studied?
Q 21What sight from a small plane over Gombe in the early 1990s moved Goodall to start TACARE?
Bare hills outside the park
Bare hills outside the park: growing villages had felled the forest right up to its boundary, and she concluded that the apes could not be saved unless their human neighbours were helped first.
Q 22Which American did Goodall's mentor recruit to study mountain gorillas, as she had chimpanzees?
Dian Fossey
Dian Fossey was working as an occupational therapist in Kentucky when he backed her; her years with the apes of the Virunga mountains became the book and film Gorillas in the Mist.
Q 23What did Goodall become after a 1986 conference showed her how fast wild chimps were vanishing?
She gave them names instead of numbers
She gave them names instead of numbers, which were meant to keep a researcher detached; when she went to write up her doctorate, her professors told her she had done everything wrong.
Q 14What became of the young Gombe chimp Flint after the death of his mother Flo in 1972?
Died within a month
Died within a month: Flint stopped eating, shunned the other apes and showed signs of clinical depression, too weak at eight years old to fight off illness.
Q 15How did Goodall earn the boat fare for her first journey to Africa in 1957?
Waitressing
Waitressing back at home paid for the ticket: when a school friend invited her to a family farm in Kenya, she quit her London job and saved until she could go.
Q 16Which 1971 book was Goodall's classic account of her first ten years at Gombe?
In the Shadow of Man
In the Shadow of Man made its apes famous far beyond science: when Flo, the old matriarch of its pages, died the following year, Britain's Sunday Times ran her obituary.
Q 17Which magazine published a series of Goodall's articles about her research in the 1960s?
National Geographic
National Geographic also put her on television: its 1965 film Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, narrated by Orson Welles, was how most of the American public first met her.
Q 18Which human disease broke out among Gombe's chimps in 1966, after cases in nearby villages?
Polio
Polio killed several of the apes and left others with useless limbs; Goodall recalled rushing oral vaccine in from Nairobi and hiding the drops in their food, one careful dose at a time.
Q 19What youth programme did Goodall begin in 1991 with a group of teenagers on her porch in Dar es Salaam?
Roots & Shoots
Roots & Shoots began, she said, because she kept meeting young people who had lost hope for the future; by 2010 it had groups in more than 100 countries.
Q 20Tchimpounga, the sanctuary Goodall's institute built in Congo in 1992, takes in chimps orphaned chiefly by what?
The bushmeat trade
The bushmeat trade kills the mothers for meat and sells their infants alive as pets; Tchimpounga, near Pointe-Noire, has grown into the largest chimp sanctuary in Africa.
A full-time campaigner
A full-time campaigner: she went into the Chicago meeting a field scientist and came out an activist, and from then on spent some 300 days a year on the road.
Q 24What role did Kofi Annan give Goodall at the United Nations in April 2002?
Messenger of Peace
Messenger of Peace is a title the head of the UN gives to only a few public figures; Annan said he chose her as someone who had 'always believed in sustainable development and conservation'.
Q 25Which honour did Goodall receive in the Queen's 2003 Birthday Honours?
A damehood
A damehood came eight years after her CBE, and it was her second title: her first marriage, to a Dutch baron, had already made her a baroness.
Q 26Which US president awarded Goodall the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden gave the highest civilian honour a US president can bestow to a Briton that day, and to an Irishman too: Goodall shared the White House ceremony with U2's Bono.
Q 27What was the profession of Goodall's first husband, Baron Hugo van Lawick?
Wildlife photographer
Wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick was sent to Gombe in 1962 to film her at work; the assignment ran on far longer than planned, the two fell in love, and they married in 1964.
Q 28What was the nickname of Goodall's son Hugo, born in 1967?
Grub
Grub grew up at Gombe, raised the way she had seen the most devoted chimp mothers do it: for his first three years she never spent a single night away from him.
Q 29What post did Goodall's second husband, Derek Bryceson, hold that helped him shield her research at Gombe?
Director of national parks
Director of national parks was the job that let Bryceson guard her camp; a wartime fighter pilot shot down over Egypt at 19, he had been told he would never walk again, yet he did.
Q 30Which animal did Goodall say was actually her favourite, rather than the chimps she studied?
Dogs
Dogs taught her first, she said: Rusty, the dog of her childhood, had shown her that animals have personalities, minds and feelings long before any scientist told her otherwise.