Poop Trivia
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48 free Poop trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free poop trivia questions with answers. Everyone poops, and almost nobody knows much about it. This quiz fixes that with questions on the science of human waste, from the seven types on the Bristol stool scale and what makes it brown to the bacteria that make up half of it, and on the animal kingdom's stranger habits: the wombat's cubes, the sloth's weekly climb, the dung beetle that steers by the Milky Way, the civet whose droppings sell for $1,300 a kilo. History gets its share too: the Guano Islands Act and Peru's bird-dropping boom, Tudor gong farmers hauling night soil, Mary Anning and the first coprolites, the Viking stool insured by a York museum, and the American who sold the first toilet paper. It suits kids' science nights, pub quizzes with a sense of humour and anyone who has ever read on the toilet. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on faeces, guano, coprolites, the animals and the history involved, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01About three-quarters of fresh human faeces is made of what?
Water
Water: fresh stool is about 75% water, and the longer it sits in the colon, the more of that water the body draws back out, which is why a stool that lingers comes out hard and dry.
Q 02What gives faeces its usual brown colour?
Bile pigments from the liver
Bile pigments from the liver: bilirubin, a leftover of worn-out red blood cells that the liver sends out in bile, is converted in the gut into the brown compound stercobilin.
Q 03What is the medical chart that sorts human faeces into seven types by shape called?
The Bristol stool scale
The Bristol stool scale was devised at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 1997, and it works because the shape tracks how long the waste has spent in the colon.
Q 04On the seven-type stool chart doctors use, types 1 and 2 point to what?
Constipation
Constipation: types 1 and 2 are hard lumps that have sat longest in the colon, while types 6 and 7, at the other end of the chart, are diarrhoea.
Q 05Doctors' stool chart calls the ideal type 'like a sausage or' which animal?
Snake
Snake: the chart's wording for type 4 is 'like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft', and types 3 and 4 count as ideal because they pass easily without excess liquid.
Q 06What is a newborn baby's first stool called?
Meconium
Meconium is sticky like tar and almost odourless, because it is made of what the baby swallowed in the womb, such as amniotic fluid, mucus and shed cells, and not of digested milk.
Q 07Skatole, the compound chiefly behind the smell of faeces, smells like which flower once heavily diluted?
Jasmine
Jasmine: skatole occurs naturally in jasmine and orange blossom, so perfumers add traces of it to floral scents, and it is even approved as a food flavouring.
Q 08Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?
The wombat
The wombat: the team that won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize found the corners form in the last stretch of its intestine, where stiff and stretchy bands of the gut wall alternate.
Q 09Why is the cube shape of certain marsupial droppings thought to be useful?
They stack and don't roll
They stack and don't roll: the animal arranges its droppings in the open to mark its territory and attract mates, so a shape that stays where it is put is an advantage.
Q 10How often do three-toed sloths climb down from the trees to defecate?
About once a week
About once a week: the sloth climbs down, digs a hole and covers it over, a slow trip to the ground that leaves it open to predators and that biologists still argue about.
Q 11Kopi luwak, among the world's priciest coffees, uses beans that have passed through which animal?
The Asian palm civet
The Asian palm civet: it eats ripe coffee cherries and passes the beans whole, and rising demand has since led producers to keep civets in battery cages and force-feed them.
Q 12Kopi luwak originated in the coffee plantations of which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia: on Java's Dutch colonial plantations in the 19th century, farmers began brewing the beans they gathered from animal droppings, and Indonesian islands still produce most of it.
Q 13A male Onthophagus taurus dung beetle can pull 1,141 times its weight, like a person lifting six full what?
Double-decker buses
Q 21What happened to the famous Viking-age Lloyds Bank specimen in 2003?
It was dropped and broke
It was dropped and broke: the specimen snapped into three pieces while being shown to visitors and had to be pieced back together, years after an expert called it as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels.
Q 22Guano, prized as fertiliser, is the accumulated droppings of which animals?
Seabirds and bats
Seabirds and bats: their droppings are so rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium that 19th-century farmers paid to have them shipped across oceans.
Q 23Which Pacific atoll did a sea captain claim for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands Act?
Midway
Double-decker buses: the beetle's strength is for fighting, not hauling dung, as rival males lock horns underground and try to shove each other out of a female's burrow.
Q 14The African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is the only insect known to navigate by what?
The Milky Way
Ancient Egyptians saw the ball-rolling scarab as the god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky.
Q 15Which country ran a two-decade project from 1965 to import dung beetles to deal with cattle dung?
Australia
Australia: its native beetles had evolved on the dry pellets of kangaroos and left wet cattle pats to smother pasture and breed flies, so scientists shipped in species from Africa and Europe.
Q 16Much of the white sand on tropical beaches, such as Hawaii's, is the excrement of which fish?
Parrotfish
Parrotfish: they scrape algae off dead coral with beak-like teeth, grind up the rock they swallow, and pass it as fine sand, in big species hundreds of pounds a year.
Q 17Ecologists sort dung beetles by habit into rollers, tunnellers and which third group?
Dwellers
Dwellers: they neither roll dung away nor bury it, and simply live inside the pat; among rollers, it is usually the male that pushes the ball while the female rides or follows.
Q 18What is the scientific term for fossilised faeces?
Coprolite
Coprolite: the name joins the Greek for dung and stone, and such fossils are prized because they hold direct evidence of what extinct animals ate.
Q 19Which fossil hunter's observation of stones inside ichthyosaur skeletons revealed them to be fossilised dung?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning noticed as early as 1824 that the odd stones lying inside her Lyme Regis ichthyosaurs held fish bones and scales when broken open, the clue that they had once been meals.
Q 20The Lloyds Bank specimen, a famous fossilised human stool, was found in 1972 in which English city?
York
York: it lay beneath the future site of a Lloyds Bank branch, in the Viking town of Jórvík, and its hundreds of parasite eggs show that its maker was riddled with worms.
Midway: the Act let any American who found guano on an unclaimed island take it for the United States, yet nobody is recorded as ever mining guano on Midway.
Q 24Which South American country's guano trade dominated the 19th century, centred on the Chincha Islands?
Peru
Peru: the islands were so valuable that Spain seized them in 1864, starting a war, and by the end of that decade their richest deposits were close to worked out.
Q 25What did the Haber-Bosch process do to the guano trade after 1910?
Collapsed demand for it
Collapsed demand for it: the process makes fertiliser from the nitrogen in air, so farmers no longer needed droppings dug from distant islands and shipped across oceans.
Q 26Rabbits produce and eat soft nutrient packets from their gut called what?
Cecotropes
Cecotropes are made in the cecum, where microbes ferment fibre into vitamins and amino acids, and the rabbit eats them as they emerge so those nutrients get a second trip through the gut.
Q 27Ambergris, the perfume fixative once worth a fortune, forms in the digestive system of which animal?
The sperm whale
The sperm whale: ambergris is thought to form in its gut around the sharp beaks of the squid it eats, and though fresh lumps smell faecal, years at sea turn the scent sweet.
Q 28Whale faeces help fight climate change by fertilising what?
Phytoplankton
Phytoplankton: whales feed in the depths and release their plumes at the surface, and the iron and nitrogen in them feed blooms of these tiny plants, which take up carbon dioxide.
Q 29In Tudor England, what were the men who emptied cesspits at night called?
Gong farmers
Gong farmers could work only at night and had to cart the waste beyond the town boundary, but the pay was good: sixpence a day at Hampton Court under Elizabeth I.
Q 30Which crisis of the hot summer of 1858 pushed Parliament to pay for London's modern sewers?
The Great Stink
The Great Stink: The Times said Parliament was 'all but compelled to legislate' by sheer stench, and Joseph Bazalgette's sewers went on to end the city's cholera outbreaks.