Jurassic Trivia
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49 free Jurassic trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Jurassic trivia quiz is about the real Jurassic: the middle period of the Mesozoic Era, roughly 201 to 143 million years ago, when dinosaurs took over the land, the first birds took to the air and Pangaea began to tear apart. If you were looking for the movies, our Jurassic Park quiz is the one for you; this page covers the science. The easy questions are the ones a keen ten-year-old would get: which periods came before and after, which mountains gave the Jurassic its name, which famous feathered fossil dates from it, and which spiky-tailed dinosaur roamed the Late Jurassic plains. From there it gets harder: the ammonites geologists use to date the rocks, the two supercontinents Pangaea split into, the German limestone that preserved Archaeopteryx, the Bone Wars fought over the Morrison Formation, the beaver-tailed mammal and the gliding mammals, the biggest bony fish that ever lived, the naming of Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus, and the one geological boundary still without a formal definition. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the Jurassic Period, its formations and its animals before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Triassic, dinosaurs and Jurassic Park quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Jura Mountains, which gave the Jurassic its name, straddle France's border with which country?
Switzerland
Switzerland. Rocks of this age were first studied in the limestone of the Jura range, so the whole period took the mountains' name.
Q 02Which period came immediately before the Jurassic?
The Triassic
The Triassic. It ended in a mass extinction about 201 million years ago, which cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate the Jurassic.
Q 03Which period followed the Jurassic?
The Cretaceous
The Cretaceous. It ended about 66 million years ago, when an asteroid struck near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out every dinosaur except the birds.
Q 04Which famous dinosaur evolved more than 60 million years after the Jurassic ended?
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus rex lived 68 to 66 million years ago, so less time separates it from us than from any dinosaur of the Jurassic.
Q 05The Jurassic is the second period of which era?
The Mesozoic
The Mesozoic. Its name means 'middle life', because its fossils fall between the ancient forms of the Paleozoic and the modern ones of the Cenozoic.
Q 06By the start of the Jurassic, the supercontinent Pangaea had begun splitting into which two landmasses?
Laurasia and Gondwana
Laurasia and Gondwana. Laurasia in the north went on to become North America and Eurasia, while Gondwana broke into the southern continents and India.
Q 07Which feature of today's Earth did the Jurassic world lack?
Polar ice caps
Polar ice caps. Rocks of the period show no evidence of major glaciation, a sign that the Jurassic world was far warmer than today's.
Q 08Which Jurassic dinosaur, described from bones found in Oxfordshire, was the first dinosaur ever named?
Megalosaurus
Megalosaurus. It got its name in 1824, almost twenty years before the word dinosaur existed, and was first pictured as a giant lizard 20 metres long.
Q 09Which fossils are the primary index fossils used to divide Jurassic rocks into stages and zones?
Ammonites
Ammonites. They evolved so quickly that each species lasted only a short time, so finding one pins a rock layer to a narrow slice of the Jurassic.
Q 10The eruptions that opened the Jurassic came as Pangaea began tearing apart to form which ocean?
The Atlantic
The Atlantic. Lava from the widening rift, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, still lines the eastern United States and Morocco and is tied to the extinction that opened the Jurassic.
Q 11Which naturalist's name for the Jura limestone, 'Jura-Kalkstein', grew into the word Jurassic?
Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt. He named the Jura's limestone in the 1790s, but it was a Frenchman, Alexandre Brongniart, who turned his label into Jurassic three decades later.
Q 12Which fossil hunter dug Jurassic sea-reptile skeletons from the cliffs of Lyme Regis in the early 1800s?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning. She was barely a teenager when she dug out her first great skeleton, yet as a woman she could never join the Geological Society of London.
Q 13Which Jurassic dinosaur name, dropped in 1903 as a duplicate of Apatosaurus, was revived by a 2015 study?
Brontosaurus
Q 21Archaeopteryx was roughly the size of which living bird?
A Eurasian magpie
A Eurasian magpie. For all its bird-like wings, it kept a reptile's toothed jaws, clawed fingers and long bony tail.
Q 22Which Late Jurassic rock formation of the American West is famous for its wealth of dinosaur skeletons?
The Morrison
The Morrison. Its beds are the mud and sand of ancient rivers and floodplains, which buried the bones of the giants that lived along them.
Q 23Which two rival palaeontologists fought the 'Bone Wars' over Jurassic fossil beds?
Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope
Brontosaurus. For over a century scientists treated it as a mislabelled Apatosaurus while museums and films kept the name alive, and some experts still reject its comeback.
Q 14Which is the only Jurassic stage named from Greek mythology rather than a place?
Tithonian
Tithonian. Albert Oppel named it after Tithonus, lover of the dawn goddess Eos, because the stage sits at the dawn of the next geological period.
Q 15Which Early Jurassic predator did the film Jurassic Park give a venomous spit and neck frill that no fossil supports?
Dilophosaurus
Dilophosaurus. The real animal was far larger than the film's version, among the biggest land predators of its day, and its fossils show no sign of a frill or venom.
Q 16Kimmeridge Clay, a Jurassic mudstone named after a Dorset village, is a major source of the oil beneath which sea?
The North Sea
The North Sea. Oil lies under Kimmeridge itself too, where a 'nodding donkey' pump on the cliffs above the bay has been running since the early 1960s.
Q 17During the Jurassic, which vertebrates dominated the skies?
Pterosaurs
Pterosaurs. Often mistaken for flying dinosaurs, they were a separate group of reptiles whose wings were skin stretched from one hugely lengthened finger.
Q 18The first birds appeared in the Jurassic, evolving from which group of dinosaurs?
Theropods
Theropods. Oddly, birds did not arise from the 'bird-hipped' dinosaurs but from the 'lizard-hipped' line of two-legged hunters that includes Velociraptor.
Q 19Archaeopteryx lived in the Late Jurassic in what is now which country?
Germany
Germany. Its fossils come from limestone quarried in the south of the country for printing plates, a stone so fine-grained that it preserved the animal in exquisite detail.
Q 20Archaeopteryx was first named in 1861 from what kind of fossil?
A single feather
A single feather. It was the first fossil feather ever found, and scientists still argue over whether it came from the same animal as the skeletons that later took the name.
Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope. Their ruthless race to outdo each other ended up giving science more than 130 new dinosaur species.
Q 24Besides dinosaur bones, Jurassic river sandstones of the American Southwest fuelled a 1950s mining boom in which ore?
Uranium
Uranium. The ore had gathered in the sands of ancient river channels, and Cold War demand for nuclear fuel and weapons set off a prospecting rush across the region.
Q 25Which group of dinosaurs became the dominant large herbivores and the largest land animals ever in the Jurassic?
Sauropods
Sauropods. Scientists once assumed giants like Apatosaurus had to wade in swamps to support their bulk, an idea later research overturned: they lived on dry land.
Q 26Which Jurassic giant had front legs longer than its hind legs, giving its back a giraffe-like upward slope?
Brachiosaurus
Brachiosaurus. Its name means 'arm lizard' after those long forelimbs, though the animal most books show under that name was long its African look-alike, Giraffatitan.
Q 27Andrew Carnegie gave plaster casts of which Jurassic dinosaur skeleton to museums around the world, starting with London in 1905?
Diplodocus
Diplodocus. King Edward VII had asked for a copy of the skeleton in Carnegie's Pittsburgh museum, and the London cast became a national favourite nicknamed Dippy.
Q 28Which Late Jurassic dinosaur is known for kite-shaped plates along its back and spikes on its tail?
Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus. Its tail spikes are known as a thagomizer, a word invented as a joke in a 1982 Far Side cartoon and later taken up by palaeontologists.
Q 29A towering Giraffatitan skeleton, dug from Jurassic rocks in Tanzania before the First World War, stands in a museum in which city?
Berlin
Berlin. Tanzania was then part of German East Africa, and expeditions from the city's natural history museum began shipping the bones home in 1909.
Q 30Which meat-eater was the commonest big predator of the Late Jurassic American West?
Allosaurus
Allosaurus. Its name means 'different lizard', because its discoverer thought its backbones were unlike those of any dinosaur then known.