Taxonomy Trivia
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100 free Taxonomy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every living thing that science has met carries a two-word Latin label, and behind that label sits a hierarchy that runs from the broadest groupings down to the single species. Carl Linnaeus built the system in the 1750s, and biologists have been arguing about its ranks, its kingdoms and its rules ever since. These 100 questions cover the whole field: Linnaeus and his Systema Naturae, the main ranks and how they nest, the kingdom schemes from the 18th century to today, the codes that police the names of plants, animals and microbes, the basics of reading an evolutionary tree, and the scientific names of animals and plants you already know, plus the jokes and tributes that taxonomists have smuggled into the literature. It suits a biology class, a pub quiz round or anyone who has wondered what the italics on a museum label actually mean. Play on your phone with instant explanations, or print it out; every answer is cited to a reference page.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A 2011 study put Earth's eukaryote species at 8.7 million and found most of them were what?
Not yet named
Not yet named: the study reckoned about 86% of species still awaited description, a backlog that could take taxonomists 1,200 years at the pace of the time.
Q 02Which fruit's species epithet lycopersicum comes from the Greek for 'wolf peach'?
Tomato
Tomato is Solanum lycopersicum once more: Philip Miller moved it out of Linnaeus's potato genus into one of its own, Lycopersicon, and genetic evidence later sent it back.
Q 03Why is 'boa constrictor' a rarity among English animal names?
It is also the binomial
It is also the binomial, Boa constrictor, one of the few scientific names to enter everyday speech; every boa squeezes its prey, yet only this species goes by the name.
Q 04Which rorqual's name musculus may be a Linnaeus pun, since the Latin can mean 'little mouse'?
Blue whale
Blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus, 'winged whale' plus a word that can mean 'muscle' or 'little mouse', possibly Linnaeus's joke about the largest animal known to have lived.
Q 05Following his friend Peter Artedi, in which class did Linnaeus first file whales and the manatee?
Fishes
Fishes held the whales until the 10th edition of 1758 moved them into the mammal class, one of many reshuffles across the twelve editions Linnaeus oversaw.
Q 06Which animals, grouped with the birds in older systems, did Linnaeus classify as mammals?
Bats
Bats, the only mammals capable of true flight, were placed by Linnaeus in 1758 in the same order as humans, apes and monkeys, under the genus Vespertilio.
Q 07Which animal's scientific name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, translates as 'black and white cat-foot'?
Giant panda
Giant panda is the species so named, and for all the cat in its name the animal is a bear, endemic to China.
Q 08Which lab workhorse's name means 'black-bellied dew-lover', after the dark end of its abdomen?
Fruit fly
Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster takes 'dew-loving' from the Greek drosos and philos, and it haunts orchards, kitchens and pubs wherever fruit ferments.
Q 09US textbooks traditionally teach six kingdoms rather than five by splitting which old kingdom in two?
Monera
Monera, the old kingdom of cells without a nucleus, becomes two kingdoms of bacteria in American books, while textbooks in Britain, India and Brazil keep it whole and stop at five.
Q 10A fungus found in Sarawak, Malaysia, was named in 2011 after which Nickelodeon cartoon character?
SpongeBob
SpongeBob gave the fungus the epithet squarepantsii, while its genus Spongiforma describes the sponge-like fruiting body; it is one of only two species in the genus.
Q 11Archaea were named 'ancient things' because the first known members made which gas, thought to mirror early Earth?
Methane
Methane makers were the first archaea known, and their chemistry was assumed to echo Earth's primitive atmosphere; the group has since turned up in habitats of every kind.
Q 12Which eighth rank, proposed in 1990, sits above kingdom at the very top of the modern hierarchy?
Domain
Domain was Carl Woese's proposal once ribosomal RNA showed that the prokaryotes fall into two deeply separate lineages, and he had at first called his three primary groupings 'kingdoms'.
Q 13Linnaeus's order Primates, home to humans, apes and monkeys, takes its name from Latin for what?
First in rank
Q 21Which singer was honoured in 2011 by an Australian horse fly with a golden-haired rear end?
Beyoncé
Beyoncé's namesake, Scaptia beyonceae, was found in Queensland's Atherton Tablelands in 1981 but waited 30 years for a formal description.
Q 22Which Star Wars character names a Chinese trilobite, described in 2005 as its genus's only species?
Han Solo
Han Solo's trilobite is Han solo; the paper explains 'solo' as the last survivor of its family, but Samuel Turvey later said friends had dared him to name a species after a Star Wars character.
Q 23Which US president was honoured in 2017 by a tiny moth found in Southern California and northern Mexico?
Donald Trump
First in rank: Linnaeus thought this the highest order of animals and put humans in it, replacing his earlier heading Anthropomorpha, 'man-shaped'.
Q 14Which non-living kingdom did Linnaeus rank alongside plants and animals in Systema Naturae?
Minerals
Minerals formed Linnaeus's Regnum Lapideum beside the animals and plants, the three kingdoms behind the parlour-game question 'animal, vegetable or mineral?'
Q 15Which ape's name pairs a Greek god with troglodytes, after a mythical race of cave-dwellers?
Chimpanzee
Chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes; Troglodyte had first been proposed as its genus name, but the wren's genus had got there first.
Q 16Which dog-like African carnivores actually sit on the cat side of Carnivora, among the feliforms?
Hyenas
Hyenas groom, scent-mark and rear their young like other feliforms, and early in their history they split into lightly built dog-like forms and robust bone-crushers.
Q 17Humans, sea squirts and the tiny lancelets all belong to which phylum, split into three subphyla?
Chordata
Chordata is named for the notochord, a stiffening rod that sea squirts have only as swimming larvae, before they settle down as sessile adults.
Q 18Which single order accounts for about 40% of all mammal species?
Rodentia
Rodentia, from the Latin for 'gnawing', share a pair of incisors in each jaw that never stop growing, so capybaras and house mice alike must gnaw to keep them worn down.
Q 19Which primate is named after a tribe of hairy people reported by the Carthaginian navigator Hanno around 500 BC?
Gorilla
Gorilla was the epithet Thomas Savage chose in 1847 from Hanno's 'Gorillai', whose skins were reputedly kept at Carthage; whether Hanno met gorillas, other apes or people is unknown.
Q 20What is the plural of genus, the rank that groups the lion, tiger and leopard together as Panthera?
Genera
Genera is the Latin plural, and because the standards for the rank are not strictly codified, different authorities often carve the same species into different ones.
Donald Trump's namesake Neopalpa donaldtrumpi has yellowish-white head scales that reminded Vazrick Nazari of his hair, and Nazari hoped the name would draw attention to fragile habitats.
Q 24Which musician is honoured by a Malaysian huntsman spider that Peter Jäger described in 2008?
David Bowie
David Bowie's spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, nods to songs such as 'Glass Spider' and to his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Q 25A land snail endemic to Fiji's Viti Levu was named Ba humbugi in a nod to which Dickens character?
Ebenezer Scrooge
Ebenezer Scrooge's catchphrase 'Bah, humbug' gave Alan Solem an 'irresistible impulse' once he had named the genus Ba after Fiji's Ba District.
Q 26A Cambrian arthropod with scissor-like claws, found in Kootenay National Park, was named after which actor?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp played Edward Scissorhands, the character David Legg said he could not help thinking of when he first saw the fossil's pair of claws.
Q 27In modern usage, how is the first letter of a species epithet written when it honours a person or place?
Always lowercase
Always lowercase today, even for proper nouns, while the genus takes the capital; botanical works before the 1950s often capitalised epithets taken from the names of people or places.
Q 28What do the brackets in 'Passer domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758)' signal?
Changed genus
Changed genus: Linnaeus named the house sparrow Fringilla domestica, and the brackets keep his name attached after the bird's move to Passer.
Q 29What is a name such as Bison bison, where the genus and species words are identical, called?
Tautonym
Tautonym names are legal for animals, even the three-word Bison bison bison, but the plant code bans them outright, which is why no plant is Larix larix today.
Q 30Which principle says the oldest available name is the valid one when an animal has been named twice?
Priority
Priority sent 19th-century zoologists digging up the oldest possible names, challenging those used by Louis Agassiz, Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen.