50 free Tortoise trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tortoises are the longest-lived land animals on Earth, and this quiz is built around the individuals who proved it: Jonathan on St Helena, hatched around 1832 and still eating; Tu'i Malila, given to Tonga's royal family by Captain Cook; Harriet, who may have sailed with Darwin; Adwaita of Kolkata, possibly 255; and Lonesome George, the last of his kind. Alongside them are the giants of the Galápagos and Aldabra, the desert and gopher tortoises of North America, the leopard and sulcata of Africa, and the little padlopers of the Cape. It also covers how tortoises work: why counting shell rings does not give you an age, how a creature that cannot swim colonised islands 740 km offshore, how to sex one from its tail, why hatchlings eat worms, and how two Russian tortoises became the first animals to circle the Moon. Aesop, Hermes' lyre, Vishnu's Kurma and Chinese oracle bones round out the culture. Easy questions ask what tortoises eat and where they are absent; hard ones want incubation periods, weights and hippocampus anatomy. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on tortoises and the species and individuals involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Turtles & Tortoises quiz covers the wider order if you want sea turtles and terrapins too.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tortoises make up which family of the order Testudines?
Testudinidae
Testudines is simply Latin for 'tortoise'; the family name applies only to the land-dwelling species with domed shells.
Q 02Tortoises are the longest-living what?
Land animals
Most species manage 80 to 150 years, and a few individuals have been credibly documented well beyond that.
Q 03The smallest tortoise, the speckled Cape tortoise, has a shell only about how long?
6.8 cm
At the other extreme, the Galápagos giant tortoise grows past 1.2 metres.
Q 04Captain Cook gave the tortoise Tu'i Malila, one of the oldest ever recorded, to which country's royal family?
Tonga
Presented shortly after hatching in 1777, it stayed with the royal household until it died in 1965, aged 188.
Q 05Adwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise claimed to be over 250 at death in 2006, lived at a zoo in which Indian city?
Kolkata
It was said to have been the pet of Robert Clive and was handed to the Alipore zoo when it opened in 1875.
Q 06Timothy, a tortoise who lived to about 165, spent 38 years as a mascot aboard which country's warships?
Britain's
She retired to Powderham Castle in Devon in 1892 and was thought to be the UK's oldest resident when she died in 2004.
Q 07Do the concentric rings on a tortoise's shell reliably tell you its age?
No, growth depends on food and water
A well-fed pet may show no rings at all, others grow more than one a season, and wear erases old ones.
Q 08What is the easiest way to tell a male tortoise from a female?
Look at the tail
Males have much longer tails held up and to the side; the male's plastron is also curved inward to help with mating.
Q 09Which brain region, tied to memory and spatial navigation, do red-footed tortoises lack entirely?
Hippocampus
They seem to use the medial cortex instead, an area humans use for decision-making.
Q 10Which continent-region has no native tortoises at all?
Australasia
Australians traditionally called their freshwater turtles 'tortoises' anyway, to the annoyance of local experts.
Q 11Tortoises cannot swim, yet they have survived ocean crossings of more than how far?
740 km
They can drift for months without food or fresh water, which is how giant tortoises reached so many islands.
Q 12How many species of giant tortoise survived into the 21st century?
Two
The Aldabra giant tortoise and the dozen subspecies of Galápagos giant tortoise; giants on Malta, the Canaries, Mauritius and Cuba were all wiped out by people.
Q 13Newly hatched tortoises live off what for their first three to seven days?
An embryonic egg sac
Once mobile, hatchlings of even strictly herbivorous species often eat worms or insect larvae for extra protein.
Q 21Which Galápagos environments produce tortoises with 'saddleback' shells and long necks?
Dry lowlands with sparse ground vegetation
Darwin's notes on those differences during the Beagle's 1835 visit fed into his theory of evolution.
Q 22Galápagos tortoises can survive how long without any food or water?
Up to a year
They break down body fat to make water, which is why sailors stacked them alive in ships' holds as fresh meat.
Q 23What was Lonesome George?
The last Pinta Island tortoise
Q 14What do tortoises generally eat?
Grasses, weeds, greens and flowers
Too much protein causes shell deformities in herbivorous species, though a few have been seen catching birds.
Q 15How do tortoises communicate during both combat and courtship?
Ramming
With a shell and short limbs, visual signals are weak, so smell finds a mate and shell-bashing settles the rest.
Q 16In Hinduism, Vishnu's second avatar Kurma took the form of a half-man, half-what?
Tortoise
He sat on the ocean floor after the Great Flood while the gods placed a mountain on his back to churn the sea.
Q 17In Greek myth, Hermes made the first lyre from what?
A tortoise shell
In East Asian folk religion tortoises are oracular, and their shells were once used as oracle bones.
Q 18In September 1968 two Russian tortoises became the first animals to do what?
Fly to and circle the Moon
Their Zond 5 mission brought them home safely, months before Apollo 8 carried humans around the Moon.
Q 19How many subspecies of Galápagos giant tortoise are recognised, living and extinct?
15
Twelve survive; the species is the largest living tortoise and can weigh up to 417 kg.
Q 20The Galápagos Islands are named after the Spanish word 'galápago', meaning what?
Tortoise
Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers found more than 250,000 of the animals; by the 1970s about 15,000 were left.
First spotted on Pinta in 1971 after goats had stripped the island, he died in June 2012 without leaving offspring despite a $10,000 reward for a mate.
Q 24Which Galápagos tortoise fathered over 900 offspring in a breeding programme before retiring in 2020?
Diego
He had spent decades unrecognised at San Diego Zoo until DNA testing showed he was a Hood Island tortoise; his line now numbers over 2,000 on Española.
Q 25Harriet, who died at Australia Zoo in 2006 aged about 175, was long claimed to have been collected by whom?
Charles Darwin
The story is doubted because he never visited Santa Cruz, the island she came from; the zoo belonged to Steve and Terri Irwin.
Q 26Jonathan, the record-old tortoise, was taken to which island from the Seychelles in 1882?
Saint Helena
He arrived already about 50 years old, was recognised in 2022 as the oldest known living land animal, and has been kept on the grounds of the governor's residence.
Q 27Jonathan is thought to have hatched around which year?
1832
A photograph from 1886 shows him already fully grown; the island granted him an official birthday of 4 December in 2022.
Q 28Which sense did the tortoise Jonathan keep after going blind and losing his smell?
Hearing
By the 2020s he was being fed by hand and spent most of his time with Frederik, a fellow male he was introduced to in 1991.
Q 29Jonathan appears on the reverse of which coin of his home island?
Five pence
Commemorative stamps marked his supposed 190th birthday in 2022, and visitors got a certificate with a photo of his first known footprint.
Q 30Aldabra Atoll is home to roughly how many giant tortoises, the world's largest population?
100,000
The atoll's isolation from humans saved a species whose Indian Ocean cousins were all gone by 1840.