Tyrannosaurus Rex Trivia
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47 free Tyrannosaurus Rex trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tyrannosaurus rex is the dinosaur everyone can name, and this quiz digs into what a century of fossils has actually revealed. It covers where and when the tyrant king lived, how big the largest specimens really were, why its bite is rated the strongest of any land animal ever, what those little arms were probably for, how fast it could plausibly run, whether it had feathers, and why the predator-versus-scavenger argument ran for so long. There are questions on the famous skeletons and the people behind them: Barnum Brown's first find in 1900, Henry Fairfield Osborn's naming in 1905, Sue and her $8.3 million auction, Stan's $31.8 million sale, Scotty, Trix, Bucky, B-rex and the medullary bone that proved she was female, and Jane, the possible Nanotyrannus. It ends with T. rex in culture, from the upright museum mount that misled artists for 77 years to the Jurassic Park breakout. Easy questions ask what 'rex' means and how many fingers; hard ones want newtons, vertebra counts and formation names. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Tyrannosaurus and its best-known specimens, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Dinosaurs quiz goes wider if you want more.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the 'rex' in Tyrannosaurus rex mean?
King
King. The full name means 'tyrant lizard king', and it only just stuck: scrappy bones named Manospondylus gigas, 'giant porous vertebra', back in 1892 turned out to belong to the same animal.
Q 02On which island continent, now part of western North America, did Tyrannosaurus live?
Laramidia
Laramidia. A shallow inland sea cut North America in two for millions of years, and T. rex roamed the western half, a long strip of land running from what is now Alaska down to Mexico.
Q 03Despite starring in Jurassic Park, T. rex lived at the very end of which geological period?
Cretaceous
Cretaceous. T. rex turned up only in the period's last couple of million years, so less time separates it from us than separated it from the Jurassic's Stegosaurus.
Q 04How many clawed fingers did Tyrannosaurus have on each hand?
Two
Two. Each tiny arm ended in two clawed fingers, yet the arms were strongly muscled, and some scientists think they helped a fallen T. rex push itself back onto its feet.
Q 05Which meat-eating dinosaur is thought to have been even longer than T. rex?
Spinosaurus
Spinosaurus. The sail-backed giant from North Africa stretched to about 14 metres, a little longer than any T. rex, but it mostly ate fish and had died out more than 20 million years earlier.
Q 06Which Asian dinosaur is so close to Tyrannosaurus that some treat it as a species of the same genus?
Tarbosaurus bataar
Tarbosaurus bataar. The Mongolian giant was first named Tyrannosaurus bataar, and a smuggled skeleton that fetched over $1 million at a New York auction in 2012 was seized and sent home to Mongolia.
Q 07Who found the first partial T. rex skeleton, in eastern Wyoming in 1900?
Barnum Brown
Barnum Brown. The American Museum's fossil hunter struck again in Montana in 1902, and it was that second skeleton, not his first, that the species was named from.
Q 08Who named Tyrannosaurus rex in 1905?
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn. In the same 1905 paper he called another skeleton Dynamosaurus imperiosus, then realised both were one species; T. rex survived because it came first in print.
Q 09Which web browser lets you play as a pixelated T. rex when your internet connection drops?
Chrome
Chrome. Google's designers chose a dinosaur as a joke about being sent back to the prehistoric age without Wi-Fi, and codenamed the game Project Bolan after the singer of the band T. Rex.
Q 10Why did New York's American Museum sell its original T. rex skeleton in 1941?
Bombing fears
Bombing fears. With the Second World War under way the museum feared air raids on New York, so the skeleton the species is named from went to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum and never came back.
Q 11Sue, the most complete T. rex yet found, takes its name from whom?
Its discoverer
Its discoverer. Sue Hendrickson spotted a few big bones jutting from a South Dakota cliff in 1990; despite the name, nobody knows whether the dinosaur itself was male or female.
Q 12Which fast-food chain helped buy Sue the T. rex in 1997?
McDonald's
McDonald's. It teamed up with Disney to back the winning bid of around $8 million, then paid for a lab behind glass where the public could watch the bones being cleaned.
Q 13Sue the T. rex is on permanent display in which city?
Chicago
Chicago. Sue greeted visitors in the Field Museum's main hall for 18 years, then moved in 2018 to a private gallery where the skeleton gained the belly ribs left off the first mount.
Q 21T. rex's huge teeth have been memorably likened to which fruit?
Bananas
Bananas. One palaeontologist called them 'lethal bananas': thick, curved and ridged, they were built to punch into bone and hold on, not to slice like the dagger teeth of other predators.
Q 22Which film star sparked rumours of buying Stan by showing a T. rex skull during a 2022 NFL broadcast?
Dwayne Johnson
Dwayne Johnson. The Rock's trophy was a replica: the firm that dug Stan up had sold him a cast of the skull, and the real skeleton's secret buyer turned out to be a museum.
Q 23Which job have scientists seriously proposed for T. rex's tiny arms?
Gripping a mate
Q 14Which part of Sue the T. rex sits in its own display case instead of on the skeleton?
The skull
The skull. The real one weighs about 600 pounds and scientists want it within reach, so the skeleton wears a lighter cast while the original sits in a case that opens for study.
Q 15Stan, the T. rex sold for $31.8 million in 2020, was auctioned by which house?
Christie's
Christie's. The anonymous buyer kept Stan out of sight for about a year and a half, worrying scientists, before the skeleton resurfaced as the star of a new natural history museum in Abu Dhabi.
Q 16Jurassic Park wrongly claims a T. rex cannot see you if you do what?
Stand perfectly still
Stand perfectly still. Palaeontologists call the film's tip complete fiction: the real animal had keen, forward-facing eyes, so freezing in front of one would only have made its dinner easier.
Q 17Bucky, found by 20-year-old Bucky Derflinger in 1998, was the first T. rex to preserve which bone?
The furcula, or wishbone
The furcula, or wishbone. Wishbones are a trademark of living birds, so finding one inside a teenage T. rex was one more sign that birds and dinosaurs are kin.
Q 18Scotty, perhaps the heaviest T. rex known, comes not from Alberta but from which other Canadian province?
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan. The skeleton is named after the bottle of Scotch its finders shared to celebrate in 1991, and freeing the bones from iron-hard sandstone then took more than a decade.
Q 19Trix, a T. rex named after a former queen, is the star of a museum in which country?
Netherlands
Netherlands. Leiden's Naturalis museum dug her up in Montana, the Dutch public chipped in ten euros at a time to bring her home, and she was named after the former Queen Beatrix.
Q 20The asteroid that wiped out T. rex 66 million years ago struck what is now which country?
Mexico
Mexico. The asteroid, some 10 km across, left a vast crater now buried beneath the Yucatan coast, and its age matches the last dinosaur fossils exactly.
Gripping a mate. That 1906 suggestion is the oldest of many; others argue the metre-long arms slashed at prey with their claws, and the question is still open.
Q 24Which palaeontologist championed the idea that T. rex was purely a scavenger, not a predator?
Jack Horner
Jack Horner. The palaeontologist said to have inspired Jurassic Park's hero preached his scavenger theory for years to a largely unconvinced field, pointing to T. rex's puny arms and keen nose.
Q 25Healed marks read as T. rex bites on the skull of which dinosaur suggest it survived a clash?
Triceratops
Triceratops. The marks sit on a brow horn and the neck frill, and the horn had snapped and then begun to heal, so if a T. rex made them, this one walked away from the meeting.
Q 26Tooth marks on the foot bones and humerus of several T. rex specimens are evidence of what behaviour?
Cannibalism
Cannibalism. The marks look like feeding rather than fighting, so a T. rex probably scavenged the carcass of one of its own kind when it got the chance.
Q 27Holes in the jaw of Sue the T. rex, once read as bites, were blamed in 2009 on what?
Parasites
Parasites. A 2009 study matched the holes to an infection that still eats into the jaws of modern raptors, and argued that a bad case could have left Sue unable to feed and starving.
Q 28A 2017 computer model found an adult T. rex would have broken its leg bones if it tried to do what?
Run
Run. The model found a true running gait would have overloaded the skeleton, limiting adults to a brisk walk of about 12 mph, so the jeep in Jurassic Park would have got away easily.
Q 29One study found that T. rex beat a hawk at which visual skill?
Judging distance
Judging distance. Its eyes faced forward enough to overlap across 55 degrees, a wider field than a hawk's, and its snout grew lower and narrower over time to clear the view.
Q 30T. rex's sense of smell has been compared to that of which modern bird?
Vultures
Vultures. The smell-processing bulbs of its brain were unusually large, so T. rex could probably track a carcass, or living prey, from a long way off.