Natural History
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50 free Natural History trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Natural history is the oldest kind of science there is: looking closely at animals, plants, rocks and fossils, and working out how they fit together. It has produced some of the best stories in science, from specimens that experts dismissed as fakes to creatures known only from stone that later turned up alive in a fishing net. This quiz covers the whole cabinet. There are questions on dinosaurs and Ice Age animals, on species lost within the last few centuries, on record-breaking migrations and lifespans, and on the collectors, artists and explorers who named and described it all. The famous museums are here too, along with the star specimens that fill their halls. It is written for anyone who enjoys a museum visit or a wildlife documentary. Most questions can be reasoned out from a clue in the wording, a few are aimed at keen naturalists, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 3.2-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil was nicknamed after a Beatles song played in the dig camp?
Lucy
Lucy is about 40% complete, and her bones showed that human ancestors walked upright long before their brains grew large.
Q 02Which egg-laying Australian mammal did British scientists first judge to be a stitched-together fake?
Platypus
Platypus males also carry venomous spurs on their hind feet, one more oddity on an animal that looked like a duck's beak sewn onto a beaver.
Q 03Which Ice Age mammal lingered on Russia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, long after vanishing elsewhere?
Woolly mammoth
Woolly mammoth herds also clung on at St. Paul Island until about 5,600 years ago, millennia after mainland Siberia's last ones died around 10,000 years ago.
Q 04Which plated dinosaur's tail spikes are informally called a thagomizer, a name invented in a 1982 Far Side cartoon?
Stegosaurus
Stegosaurus tail spikes had no name of their own until cartoonist Gary Larson's joke label was picked up by paleontologists.
Q 05Which Indian Ocean island was the only home of the dodo, a flightless bird wiped out soon after sailors arrived?
Mauritius
Mauritius lost the dodo within about 65 years of Dutch sailors first recording the bird in 1598.
Q 06Which animal's 25-metre skeleton has hung in the entrance hall of London's Natural History Museum since 2017?
Blue whale
Blue whale bones took the place of a much-loved Diplodocus cast; the young female had stranded on an Irish sandbar in 1891.
Q 07Which phrase, often credited to Charles Darwin, was actually coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer in 1864?
Survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest first appeared in Spencer's Principles of Biology, and Darwin added it to the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species in 1869.
Q 08Which broadcaster, brother of the director of the film Gandhi, presented the BBC's 1979 series Life on Earth?
David Attenborough
David Attenborough and a team of 30 spent three years filming at more than 100 locations, and an estimated 500 million people watched the result.
Q 09The thylacine, a marsupial predator whose last known member died in a Hobart zoo in 1936, is better known as what?
Tasmanian tiger
Tasmanian tiger stripes ran across its back and rump, and Australia marks the 1936 death each 7 September as National Threatened Species Day.
Q 10Which blue gem with a reputation for being cursed was posted to the Smithsonian in 1958 by registered mail?
Hope Diamond
The Hope Diamond arrived in a box wrapped in brown paper, insured for $1 million, with just $2.44 of the fee going on postage.
Q 11Which Royal Navy survey ship carried Charles Darwin around the world on a voyage that lasted almost five years?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle was expected to be away for two years; while the crew surveyed coasts, Darwin explored onshore, studying geology and wildlife.
Q 12Which small Galápagos birds, whose beaks vary with diet from island to island, are named after Charles Darwin?
Finches
Finches from the islands are really tanagers, and Darwin took several for blackbirds and wrens until ornithologist John Gould sorted them out.
Q 13Which Indonesian reptile, first recorded by Western scientists in 1910, is the largest living species of lizard?
Komodo dragon
Q 21Which North American bird, once numbering in the billions, vanished when Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914?
Passenger pigeon
The passenger pigeon may once have been the most numerous bird on Earth; one 1866 flock was described as taking 14 hours to pass.
Q 22Which Swedish naturalist gave living things the two-part Latin names, such as Homo sapiens, still used by scientists?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus filed humans among the primates, and he himself is designated as the type specimen for our own species.
Q 23In which US city does the Field Museum display Sue, a Tyrannosaurus rex bought at auction for over $8 million?
Chicago
The Komodo dragon drew a 1926 expedition that came home with two live animals, and the trip inspired the 1933 film King Kong.
Q 14Which orange-and-black butterfly flies thousands of miles each autumn to spend the winter in Mexican fir forests?
Monarch
Monarch butterflies make the trip south in one generation, but the return north in spring is a relay spread over several generations.
Q 15Which golden gem, often washed up on Baltic beaches, sometimes holds insects trapped tens of millions of years ago?
Amber
Amber is fossilized tree resin, and because it starts out soft and sticky it can seal in small animals and plants for good.
Q 16Which supercontinent, proposed by Alfred Wegener, held most of Earth's land before splitting into today's continents?
Pangaea
Pangaea takes its name from Greek words for 'all' and 'Mother Earth', and it was surrounded by a superocean called Panthalassa.
Q 17Which primatologist first saw wild chimpanzees fish for termites with grass stalks, at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960?
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall's sighting led her mentor Louis Leakey to say science would have to redefine both tools and humankind, or count chimpanzees as human.
Q 18Which carnivorous plant, native only to bogs in the Carolinas, snaps shut when prey touches its trigger hairs?
Venus flytrap
The Venus flytrap effectively counts: a trap closes fully only if a second hair is touched within about twenty seconds of the first.
Q 19Which extinct human relatives, named after a German valley, still account for about 2% of many living people's DNA?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals were first recognised from bones found in the Neander Valley in 1856, and the 2010 sequencing of their genome revealed the interbreeding.
Q 20Which country was home to the moa, flightless birds up to 3.6 metres tall, until hunters arrived around 1300?
New Zealand
New Zealand's moa had just one predator, the massive Haast's eagle, until people arrived; overhunting then wiped them out within about 100 years.
Chicago won the skeleton in under ten minutes of bidding, with McDonald's and Disney among the backers; it is about 90% complete by bulk.
Q 24Which seabird sees two summers a year by flying roughly from pole to pole and back, the longest migration of any animal?
Arctic tern
The Arctic tern can cover about 70,000 km in a year, and by chasing the sun it sees more daylight than any other creature on the planet.
Q 25Which group of insects, with about 400,000 described species, makes up roughly a quarter of all known animal species?
Beetles
Beetles keep turning up, too: new species are found so often that estimates of the true total run from 0.9 to 2.1 million.
Q 26Which long-necked dinosaur's name, meaning thunder lizard, was scrapped in 1903 and revived by a 2015 study?
Brontosaurus
Brontosaurus was folded into its close relative Apatosaurus by Elmer Riggs, who judged the two too alike to keep apart.
Q 27Which rank in biological classification sits just above species and supplies the first word of names like Homo sapiens?
Genus
Genus names always take a capital letter and the species word never does, which is why Tyrannosaurus rex shortens to T. rex.
Q 28Which artist-naturalist painted every species life-size for The Birds of America, a set of 435 hand-coloured prints?
John James Audubon
John James Audubon needed sheets about 39 inches tall to fit the largest birds, which is why the first edition is nicknamed the Double Elephant Folio.
Q 29Which slow-swimming fish of the cold North Atlantic can live for at least 272 years, longer than any other vertebrate?
Greenland shark
The Greenland shark only reaches maturity at around 150 years old, and the oldest one studied was estimated to be nearly 400.
Q 30Which Lyme Regis fossil hunter was twelve when she found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning went on to unearth the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons from the same stretch of Dorset cliffs.