The Sixth Extinction
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50 free The Sixth Extinction trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction argues that people are now doing to the living world what asteroids and volcanoes did in the deep past. She makes the case through travel: to rainforests, coral atolls, caves and museum basements, in the company of scientists who are watching species disappear in real time. This quiz follows the same route. Some questions are about the book itself, its author, its chapters and the honours it collected. Others cover the science and the stories behind it: the creatures already gone, the earlier catastrophes written in rock, and the thinkers who first worked out that a species can vanish for good. It suits book clubs, biology and environmental science classes, and anyone who has read the book and wants to see how much stayed with them. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up something new even on the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president hoped the Lewis and Clark Expedition would find living giant Ice Age beasts in the West?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson had written that the huge animals behind America's fossil bones still lived in the continent's unexplored north. The idea that a species could die out was barely accepted then.
Q 02Which animal, a national symbol printed on lottery tickets, vanishes from El Valle to open The Sixth Extinction?
Golden frog
The golden frog is really a toad, and it waves its limbs in a kind of semaphore because the rushing streams where it lives drown out its calls.
Q 03Which bird name was first used for the great auk before sailors gave it to southern look-alikes?
Penguin
Penguin first meant the great auk, a flightless bird of the North Atlantic, and explorers reused the word for the unrelated birds they met in the Southern Hemisphere.
Q 04Which extinct human relatives, named after a German valley, left traces of their DNA in people of non-African ancestry?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals interbred with modern humans, a discovery that came in 2010 from the first full genome read out of ancient bones.
Q 05Which award did The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert win in 2015 in the General Nonfiction category?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize citation called the book an exploration of nature that makes readers face the threat human behaviour poses to a world of astonishing diversity.
Q 06White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease first seen in an American cave in 2006, has killed millions of which animals?
Bats
Bats with the disease wake from their winter torpor too often, which is thought to burn up the fat they need to last until spring.
Q 07Which French naturalist, working at a Paris museum around 1800, established that species can go extinct?
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier showed that giant fossil bones matched no living animal, at a time when many of his peers treated the loss of a whole species as mere speculation.
Q 08In which American city's zoo did Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, die in 1914?
Cincinnati
Cincinnati was also the home of Incas, the last living Carolina parakeet, and a memorial to the vanished pigeons now stands at the zoo.
Q 09Ocean acidification, a threat to corals described in The Sixth Extinction, happens as seawater absorbs which gas?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide forms a weak acid in water, and the oceans have soaked up about a quarter of all that people have emitted since 1850.
Q 10Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, joined which magazine as a staff writer in 1999?
The New Yorker
The New Yorker ran the 2009 article that became the seed of the book, and she realised while reporting it that the subject needed far more room.
Q 11Which subtitle completes The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 book about human-driven species loss?
An Unnatural History
An Unnatural History points to her argument that this die-off, unlike the mass extinctions before it, is being caused by a single species.
Q 12Which 2021 book by Elizabeth Kolbert examines technological fixes for nature, such as dimming sunlight to cool Earth?
Under a White Sky
Under a White Sky takes its title from solar geoengineering, the most extreme fix she covers, and it shows how each cure for one problem can create another.
Q 13Which fossil hunter co-wrote a 1995 book also titled The Sixth Extinction, years before Elizabeth Kolbert's?
Q 21The asteroid strike of 66 million years ago, the fifth mass extinction, closed which geological period?
Cretaceous
The Cretaceous ended with the loss of about three-quarters of plant and animal species, including every dinosaur that was not a bird.
Q 22Which tiny colonial sea animals, whose fossils look like writing on rock, are collected at Dob's Linn in Scotland?
Graptolites
Graptolites changed form so often that the geologist Lapworth, working at Dob's Linn, showed their fossils could be used to put rock layers in order.
Q 23In The Sixth Extinction, which mechanism explains the end-Ordovician die-off, first of the Big Five mass extinctions?
Glaciation
Richard Leakey
Richard Leakey wrote it with Roger Lewin, and he had already led Kenya's wildlife service after an outcry over the poaching of elephants.
Q 14Which billionaire philanthropist named The Sixth Extinction to his summer reading list in the year it was published?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates listed it among six books he recommended on his Gates Notes blog in July of that year.
Q 15Which Ice Age relative of elephants, found at Kentucky's Big Bone Lick, names chapter two of The Sixth Extinction?
Mastodon
Mastodon comes from the Greek for breast and tooth, after the cone-shaped cusps on its molars, which look nothing like an elephant's flat grinders.
Q 16Which Scottish geologist, a close friend of Darwin, argued in Principles of Geology that Earth changes slowly?
Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell held that the forces shaping Earth today have always worked at much the same pace, a view that left little room for sudden catastrophes.
Q 17Off the coast of which country is Eldey, the island where the last known pair of great auks was killed in 1844?
Iceland
Iceland's last colony had moved to Eldey only after a volcanic eruption sank its safer, cliff-ringed rock in 1830, and museum collectors soon followed.
Q 18Which Nobel-winning physicist and his geologist son Walter proposed in 1980 that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs?
Luis Alvarez
Luis Alvarez had no idea where the impact had happened when he made the case, and the matching crater was identified only years afterwards.
Q 19Which buried crater on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula marks the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs?
Chicxulub
Chicxulub was found by geophysicists who were looking for oil in the late 1970s, and it took another decade to show the ring was an impact scar.
Q 20Which coiled-shelled relatives of squid died out with the dinosaurs and name chapter four of The Sixth Extinction?
Ammonites
Ammonites had thrived for over 300 million years, and they were closer kin to octopuses than to the nautiluses that their shells resemble.
Glaciation locked up so much water that sea levels fell, and the cooling stripped away the shallow shelf habitats where much of the era's life was found.
Q 24Huge eruptions in which region, leaving lava fields called the Traps, are blamed for the end-Permian extinction?
Siberia
Siberia's eruptions went on for roughly two million years, and the gases they released heated the planet and left the oceans starved of oxygen.
Q 25Which Dutch Nobel laureate, honoured for work on the ozone layer, popularised the term Anthropocene for the human epoch?
Paul Crutzen
Paul Crutzen argued that people had altered the atmosphere so much in recent centuries that the planet had entered a new chapter of geological time.
Q 26Which geological epoch, begun about 11,700 years ago, gives the sixth mass extinction its more formal name?
Holocene
The Holocene extinction is the scientific label for the present wave of losses, though some researchers prefer to name it after the Anthropocene instead.
Q 27One Tree Island, a coral research station near the Tropic of Capricorn, is part of which natural wonder?
Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is one of the places Elizabeth Kolbert reports from, and she warns that acidifying seas could finish off corals by the end of the century.
Q 28Which sealed glass world in Arizona, home to eight people for two years, held its own small ocean with corals?
Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2 later passed to Columbia University, whose research there showed how badly acidifying water damages corals.
Q 29In which country's Manú National Park did ecologist Miles Silman measure trees creeping uphill as the climate warms?
Peru
Peru gave the book one of its clearest cases of species on the move, because Silman could put a speed on how fast the forest was climbing the mountain.
Q 30In which rainforest have scientists studied isolated patches of trees, left standing amid cattle pasture, since 1979?
Amazon
The Amazon experiment cut its fragments in three sizes, of 1, 10 and 100 hectares, to find out how small a forest can be and still keep its species.