Petrified Forest National Park Trivia
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50 free Petrified Forest National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Petrified Forest National Park trivia quiz covers the northeastern Arizona park where 225-million-year-old trees lie scattered across the badlands as solid quartz. It ranges across the Painted Desert and its Chinle Formation, the phytosaurs and early dinosaurs dug from Blue Mesa, the Puerco Pueblo and its petroglyphs, Agate House, the Painted Desert Inn with its Fred Kabotie murals, and the strip of old Route 66 that the park still preserves. There is plenty of history too: the 1853 Whipple survey that named Lithodendron Wash, the Army camel road, John Muir's excavations, Theodore Roosevelt making it America's second national monument in 1906, the CCC years, national park status in 1962, and the endless fight against wood theft that fills the rangers' Conscience Pile. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for an I-40 road-trip game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Grand Canyon, Saguaro and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Petrified Forest National Park is in which U.S. state?
Arizona
Arizona skips daylight saving time, so the park's clocks stay on Mountain Standard Time all year and visitors arriving from neighbouring states often have to reset their watches.
Q 02Explorers from which country are said to have named the Painted Desert?
Spain
Spain's explorers, the story goes, called the coloured hills El Desierto Pintado, yet the oldest Spanish inscriptions found in the park date only to the late 1800s.
Q 03Which Petrified Forest site, seen only from an overlook, holds more than 650 ancient petroglyphs?
Newspaper Rock
Newspaper Rock is really a cluster of rock faces that generations of Puebloan farmers kept adding to, so its crowded panels cannot be read as one story; unstable slopes keep visitors up at the overlook.
Q 04What geographic term describes Petrified Forest's colourful, deeply eroded and mostly bare hills?
Badlands
Badlands form here because the clay in the hills swells when wet and cracks as it dries, so plants cannot take root and heavy rains strip the bare slopes.
Q 05Petrified Forest's trees grew when the first dinosaurs were appearing, during which geologic epoch?
Late Triassic
Late Triassic trees were not felled in one catastrophe: over millions of years they died, washed into rivers and were buried in sediment before they could rot.
Q 06Which rock formation holds Petrified Forest's fossil logs and gives the Painted Desert its colours?
Chinle
The Chinle began as mud, sand and volcanic ash spread by rivers across a lowland plain; its soft clays now erode into the banded hills of the Painted Desert.
Q 07What mineral, dissolved from volcanic ash, replaced the organic matter in Petrified Forest's logs?
Silica
Silica seeped into the buried logs with groundwater and crystallised as quartz, replacing the wood so thoroughly that each log is now almost solid quartz that sparkles in the sun.
Q 08Most of Petrified Forest's fossil logs come from which kind of tree?
Conifers
Conifers nearly 200 feet tall grew here, but the logs are no forest in place: most were washed downriver and buried.
Q 09Which crocodile-like giant reptiles are among the park's most famous fossil animals?
Phytosaurs
A phytosaur skull found near Blue Mesa in 1919 by Ynez Mexia kicked off decades of digging by Berkeley palaeontologists.
Q 10Which president used the new Antiquities Act to make Petrified Forest a national monument in 1906?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt could act without Congress: the months-old Antiquities Act let a president protect land by proclamation, and Petrified Forest came in the second batch of monuments he named.
Q 11Which became the first national monument, months before Petrified Forest?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower in Wyoming was proclaimed in September 1906; that December the same president named three more monuments in a single day, Petrified Forest among them.
Q 12Male side-blotched lizards in Petrified Forest compete for mates in a contest biologists liken to which game?
Rock paper scissors
Rock paper scissors fits because each of three male types beats one rival and loses to another: orange-throats bully the blues, blues guard against sneaky yellows, and yellows slip past the oranges.
Q 13Petrified Forest wood mailed back by guilty visitors cannot be put back in place, so rangers add it to what?
The Conscience Pile
Q 21Which famous conservationist explored the Petrified Forest with his daughters, collected its fossils and pressed for its protection?
John Muir
John Muir lodged with his daughters at the railway stop of Adamana and made regular trips out to the fossil beds; the specimens he gathered ended up at the University of California.
Q 22Many of Petrified Forest's petroglyphs were pecked through what dark natural coating on the rock?
Desert varnish
Desert varnish is a thin dark film of clay and manganese; pecking through it exposes the paler rock beneath, which is why the images still stand out.
Q 23Descendants of Petrified Forest's Ancestral Puebloans live on the Hopi Mesas and at which pueblo?
Zuni
The Conscience Pile exists because nobody can tell where a returned piece came from, and many parcels arrive with letters blaming the stolen wood for years of bad luck.
Q 14Which famous highway, decommissioned in 1985, survives in Petrified Forest only as a grassy strip lined with telephone poles?
U.S. Route 66
U.S. Route 66 gave way to a faster interstate; its old roadbed through Petrified Forest is marked today by the rusting shell of a 1932 Studebaker.
Q 15Which metal tints much of Petrified Forest's wood red and yellow?
Iron
Iron is the main pigment in petrified wood: its oxides, the same compounds as rust, stain the logs red and yellow and colour the hills of the Painted Desert too.
Q 16Which city west of Petrified Forest National Park is the nearest to it?
Holbrook
Holbrook's motels and campgrounds fill a gap the park leaves: Petrified Forest has no lodging and no developed campground, so most overnight visitors sleep outside its gates.
Q 17Lieutenant Amiel Whipple's 1853 survey named a wash in Petrified Forest Lithodendron Creek, which means what?
Stone Tree
Stone Tree was Whipple's Greek-rooted name for a creek whose banks were strewn with petrified wood; he came upon it while surveying a railway route along the 35th parallel to the Pacific.
Q 18Edward Beale's wagon-road survey across what is now Petrified Forest in 1857 tested which pack animal?
Camels
Camels won Beale over as desert haulers, but the government never invested in them: the Civil War intervened and the Army's herd was sold at auction.
Q 19Which small ancestral Puebloan structure in Petrified Forest was built almost entirely of petrified wood?
Agate House
Agate House was an eight-room home whose builders set chunks of petrified wood in mud mortar; the walls seen today were partly rebuilt in the 1930s.
Q 20A circular petroglyph at Petrified Forest's Puerco Pueblo catches the sunrise for about two weeks around which event?
The summer solstice
The summer solstice is marked as light and shadow cross the carved rings at dawn; the pueblo's people had left by about 1380, perhaps driven out by a drier climate.
Zuni, to the east, was one of the fast-growing towns the park's farming families migrated to in the 1400s, and thousands of their descendants still live there.
Q 24Which Ice Age culture left the earliest camps found in Petrified Forest?
Clovis
Clovis hunters came first, some 13,000 years ago, and knapped spear points from the park's own petrified wood; the Folsom culture followed theirs.
Q 25Which architect, known for her Grand Canyon buildings, revised the Painted Desert Inn after WWII?
Mary Jane Colter
Mary Jane Colter gave the inn a new colour scheme in 1947 and cut plate-glass windows into its thick walls so diners could look out across the desert.
Q 26One of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie's murals in the Painted Desert Inn shows a long desert trek to gather what?
Salt
Salt from a sacred lake is the goal of the painted journey; the walls that carry Kabotie's murals keep cracking because the clay soil beneath the inn never stops shifting.
Q 27Which famous Southwest hospitality company ran the Painted Desert Inn from 1947 until it closed in 1963?
Fred Harvey
The Fred Harvey Company, whose Harvey Girls waitresses were already a legend of Southwest travel, left in 1963 when the inn's cracking walls forced it out to the new visitor centre.
Q 28Which Austrian-born modernist, famed for his California houses, designed Petrified Forest's Painted Desert Visitor Center?
Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra and partner Robert Alexander were hired under Mission 66, the Park Service's drive to cope with booming post-war crowds, and built a whole staff community around the visitor centre.
Q 29Which rattlesnake, found from Canada to Mexico, is the only one in Petrified Forest?
Prairie rattlesnake
The prairie rattlesnake is the park's one true rattler, yet a buzzing tail there can be a bluff: the common gopher snake shakes its tail and puffs up to pass for one.
Q 30Which hoofed mammal of Petrified Forest's grasslands is the fastest land animal in North America?
Pronghorn
The pronghorn is often called an antelope but is not one: its closest living relatives are the giraffe and the okapi.