Safari Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
49 free Safari trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free safari trivia questions with answers. A safari is a journey, literally: the Swahili word reached English in the 1850s by way of the explorer Richard Burton. This quiz is a journey through everything the word now covers, from the parks (Serengeti and the Masai Mara, Kruger, the Okavango Delta, Ngorongoro Crater, Etosha) to the animals you go to see (the Big Five and why hunters named them that, cheetahs and their tear streaks, hippos and their 'blood sweat', elephants, giraffes, zebras, wild dogs, hyenas and meerkats), plus a little safari history: Roosevelt's 11,000 specimens, Hemingway, and the man-eaters of Tsavo. The early questions are for anyone who has watched a nature documentary; the later ones will test people who have actually been in the Land Cruiser: which country's rains flood the Okavango, how old the oldest baobab was, and what percentage of wild-dog chases end in a kill. Good for a pre-trip quiz night, a classroom geography unit or a zoo fundraiser. Every answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and each question shows its source.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'safari' entered English in the 1800s from which East African language?
Swahili
Swahili 'safari' simply means a journey, any journey at all, and traces back to Arabic 'safar'; explorer Richard Burton carried the word into English around 1860.
Q 02Which five animals make up the safari 'Big Five'?
Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, buffalo
Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, buffalo became such a national emblem that South Africa put one on each of its rand banknotes in the 1990s; the rhino slot covers both the black and white species.
Q 03Africa's Big Five earned that name as the five animals that were what?
Hardest to hunt on foot
Hardest to hunt on foot: big-game hunters coined the term for their five most dangerous quarry, and the safari tourist trade later adopted it wholesale.
Q 04The Serengeti's name is believed to derive from a Maasai word usually interpreted as meaning what?
Endless plains
Endless plains is the gloss guidebooks give for a Maasai word, siringet, yet the word is said to be missing from Maa dictionaries, so the famous translation may be more legend than linguistics.
Q 05Which South African reserve, first protected in 1898, became the country's first national park in 1926?
Kruger
Kruger began as the Sabi Game Reserve, set up in 1898 because hunters were emptying the Lowveld of big game, and took President Paul Kruger's name when it became a national park.
Q 06Which small bird rides on buffalo, rhinos and giraffes, picking ticks from their hides?
Oxpecker
Oxpecker pairs look like the perfect cleaning service, but they also peck at their hosts' wounds to drink blood, so researchers now think the relationship is partly parasitic.
Q 07The Okavango Delta in Botswana is unusual among deltas because its river does what?
Never reaches the sea
Never reaches the sea: the Okavango spills into a tectonic trough in the Kalahari, fans out across the sand and simply evaporates or soaks away, leaving a vast green oasis in a desert.
Q 08The Okavango's annual flood originates from summer rains in the highlands of which country?
Angola
Angola's highlands catch the summer rains, but the water takes months to creep south, so the delta floods at the height of Botswana's dry winter, just when wildlife needs it most.
Q 09Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania holds what geological distinction?
World's largest intact, unfilled caldera
World's largest intact, unfilled caldera: a giant volcano erupted and collapsed on itself two to three million years ago, leaving walls 600 metres high around a floor of about 260 square kilometres.
Q 10Which famous Leakey family hominin site lies within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area?
Olduvai Gorge
Olduvai Gorge is where Mary Leakey spotted a skull about 1.8 million years old in 1959; its massive jaw and grinding teeth earned it the nickname Nutcracker Man.
Q 11What does the name Etosha, Namibia's famous national park, mean in Oshindonga?
Great White Place
Great White Place is the usual translation of Etosha, named for the vast mineral pan, dry and dazzling for most of the year, that covers nearly a quarter of the park.
Q 12Etosha was first proclaimed a game reserve in 1907 under which colonial administration?
German South-West Africa
German South-West Africa's governor proclaimed the reserve, and it then ran all the way to the Skeleton Coast; later boundary changes cut it to a fraction of that size.
Q 13Which Kenyan reserve do the Great Migration's wildebeest reach each year from Tanzania?
Masai Mara
Q 21The African bush elephant carries its calf for about how long before giving birth?
22 months
22 months, nearly two years, is the longest pregnancy of any mammal; the calf arrives weighing around 100 kg, and its mother will give birth only once every few years.
Q 22An African elephant's trunk ends in what?
Two fingers
Two fingers: the finger-like tips of an African elephant's trunk work together to pluck small food. The Asian elephant manages with a single finger at the end of its trunk.
Q 23Which hypothesis for zebra stripes is most strongly supported by the evidence?
They deter biting flies
Masai Mara is the northern end of the circuit: around July the wildebeest pour in from the Serengeti in search of fresh grass, then turn back south around October.
Q 14The fastest land animal's claws differ from other cats' claws in what way?
They never fully retract
They never fully retract: the blunt, exposed claws dig into the ground like the cleats on a sprinter's shoes, giving the cat grip as it accelerates and swerves after prey.
Q 15The dark 'tear streaks' running from the eyes to the mouth are unique to which safari cat?
Cheetah
Cheetah tear streaks run from the inner corner of each eye to the mouth and are thought to cut the sun's glare, a help to a cat that hunts by day.
Q 16What are the closest living relatives of the hippopotamus?
Whales and dolphins
Whales and dolphins are the hippo's closest living kin: DNA studies show the two lines split about 55 million years ago, which puts a hippo nearer to a humpback than to the pigs it resembles.
Q 17The red secretion on a hippo's skin, nicknamed 'blood sweat', actually functions as what?
A natural sunscreen
A natural sunscreen: the secretion, neither blood nor sweat, contains the red and orange pigments hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acid, which absorb ultraviolet light and also inhibit bacteria.
Q 18A feral population of hippos in South America descends from animals kept by which man?
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar kept four hippos at his Hacienda Nápoles estate; after his death in 1993 they were left behind, escaped, and multiplied along Colombia's Magdalena river basin.
Q 19How do a giraffe's neck bones compare with a human's?
Same count, far longer
Same count, far longer: a giraffe has seven neck vertebrae just as we do, but each can be over 25 cm long. Pumping blood up that neck takes a heart weighing about 11 kg.
Q 20Why is a giraffe's long tongue thought to be so dark, almost black?
To protect it against sunburn
To protect it against sunburn is the usual explanation: the dark pigment on the exposed front of the tongue is thought to shield it during hours of browsing in full sun.
They deter biting flies is the best-supported idea: Tim Caro's 2014 comparative study tied striping to tsetse and horsefly ranges, and later experiments showed flies failing to land on striped coats.
Q 24The last captive quagga died in which city's zoo in 1883?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's Artis zoo held the last quagga, a mare that died in August 1883. Nobody realised she was the last of her kind, perhaps because people then used 'quagga' for any zebra.
Q 25The name 'wildebeest' comes from which language, meaning 'wild beast'?
Dutch
Dutch gave the name, but 'beest' meant cattle in South African Dutch, so the 'wild beast' was really wild cattle. Its other name, gnu, is thought to come from a Khoisan word.
Q 26Spotted hyena society is unusual among mammals for what reason?
Females dominate the males
Females dominate the males: they are larger and more aggressive, and even a low-ranking female generally outranks a high-ranking male.
Q 27Despite their dog-like build, hyenas are more closely related to which animals?
Cats and civets
Cats and civets: hyenas sit on the cat-like branch of the carnivores, and their dog-like build is convergent evolution, the result of running prey down on open ground and catching it with the jaws.
Q 28A group of lions, the most social of wild cats, is called what?
A pride
A pride is the lion's group: typically several related lionesses, their cubs and a coalition of one to a few adult males; the females do most of the hunting together.
Q 29Outside Africa, wild lions survive only in and around which Indian national park?
Gir
Gir Forest in Gujarat holds the last wild Asiatic lions; they survived because the local Nawab kept the forest as his private hunting ground, and from that remnant they have recovered to several hundred.
Q 30The two man-eating lions of Tsavo, which attacked railway workers in 1898, lacked what?
Manes
Manes were missing on both Tsavo males, as on many lions there; railway engineer John Henry Patterson shot them, used the skins as floor rugs for some 25 years, then sold them to Chicago's Field Museum.