90 free Weird trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
85 free weird trivia questions with answers, every one of them a fact that sounds invented until you check it. There is a war that lasted under 45 minutes, a bear who held the rank of private, a dead pope put on trial, a city that danced for two months, and a wave of molasses that outran people through the streets of Boston. The animal round covers cube-shaped droppings, three-hearted octopuses, an immortal jellyfish and a frog that freezes solid for the winter. Science and space bring a planet whose day outlasts its year, blue sunsets on Mars and a gene named after Sonic the Hedgehog. There are strange origin stories too: Nintendo's playing cards, Nokia's pulp mill, Play-Doh's life as a wallpaper cleaner and the first thing ever sold on eBay. Food, sport, geography and language rounds fill out the mix, so nobody's specialist subject dominates. It is written for adults and older kids who like the 'wait, what?' kind of fact, the craziest trivia questions and most surprising trivia questions we could verify: a pub quiz round, a long car ride, a classroom Friday. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so when someone refuses to believe you, the receipt is right there.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?
Wombat
The cubes stack without rolling away, which helps mark territory on uneven ground; the physics of how the gut shapes them won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2019.
Q 02How many hearts does an octopus have?
Three
One main heart pumps blood round the body and two smaller ones push it through the gills; the main heart actually stops beating while the animal swims.
Q 03Which animal is considered biologically immortal because it can revert its cells to a juvenile stage?
Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish
It is only about 4.5 mm across; when starved or injured it turns back into a polyp and starts over, though it can still be eaten or fall ill.
Q 04In which animal does the female deposit eggs into the male, who then gives birth?
Seahorse
The male carries the developing young in a brood pouch on his front and expels them in contractions that can last hours.
Q 05Which of these is a berry in the strict botanical sense?
Banana
Botanically a berry develops from a single ovary with seeds inside the flesh, which also makes tomatoes, grapes and cucumbers berries while raspberries and blackberries are aggregate fruits.
Q 06Flamingo chicks hatch grey. What turns the adults pink?
Carotenoids in their food
Liver enzymes break the pigments in plankton and shrimp down and deposit them in the feathers; zoo birds on the wrong diet fade to white.
Q 07Roughly how often does a three-toed sloth climb down to the ground to relieve itself?
About once a week
It digs a small hole, goes, and covers it up, and the trip to the ground is the most dangerous thing it does all week.
Q 08Where are a butterfly's taste receptors?
On its feet
A female drums a leaf with her feet to taste whether it is the right plant before laying eggs on it.
Q 09What shape are a goat's pupils?
Horizontal slits
The sideways slit gives a grazing animal a wide panoramic view for spotting predators while keeping out glare from the sky above.
Q 10What kind of tree is Pando, the single Utah organism with about 47,000 stems sharing one root system?
Quaking aspen
It covers about 106 acres and is generally held to be the heaviest single living organism on Earth.
Q 11How do wood frogs of the far north get through winter?
Their blood and tissues freeze
They can survive being frozen at minus 3 to minus 6 degrees Celsius and simply thaw out and hop away in spring.
Q 12Which animal's club-like strike accelerates at around 10,000 g, one of the fastest movements in nature?
Mantis shrimp
The blow is fast enough to boil the water around it and has been known to crack aquarium glass.
Q 13On which planet does a single rotation (one day) take longer than a full trip around the Sun (one year)?
Venus
It spins backwards too, so the Sun rises in the west; one sidereal day is 243 Earth days against a 224.7-day year.
Q 21The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?
A coffee pot
Researchers were tired of walking to an empty pot, so they streamed it to their desks; it went online in 1993 and was switched off in 2001.
Q 22The famous 'first actual case of bug being found' in a computer, in 1947, was literally what?
A moth
Operators taped it into the Harvard Mark II logbook; the word 'bug' for a fault was already engineering slang, so the note was a joke.
Q 23Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?
Hanafuda playing cards
Fusajiro Yamauchi's hand-painted flower cards were popular partly because Japan had banned most other forms of gambling in 1882.
Q 14Which planet is less dense than water and would, given a big enough bathtub, float?
Saturn
It is about 30% less dense than water despite being 95 times the mass of Earth.
Q 15Which body, discovered in 1930, has still not completed a single orbit of the Sun since it was found?
Pluto
One trip round the Sun takes about 248 years, so its first full orbit since discovery will not finish until 2178.
Q 16Sunsets on Mars are mostly what colour?
Blue
Fine red dust scatters light the opposite way to Earth's air, so the sky near the setting Sun glows blue while the daytime sky is butterscotch.
Q 17A newborn baby has around how many bones, compared with roughly 206 in an adult?
270
Many of them fuse together as the child grows, which is why the skull and pelvis start out in pieces.
Q 18Fingernails grow up to how much faster than toenails?
Four times as fast
The nail on the index finger also grows faster than the little finger's; a full fingernail takes three to six months, a toenail up to eighteen.
Q 19The right human lung has three lobes. How many does the left have?
Two
The left lung gives up room to the heart, which is why it is the smaller of the two.
Q 20The gene 'sonic hedgehog', which helps shape a growing embryo, is named after what?
A Sega video game character
Its siblings are 'desert hedgehog' and 'Indian hedgehog', named after real hedgehog species; doctors tend to use the abbreviation SHH with patients.
Q 24Nokia, later the world's biggest phone maker, was established in 1865 as what?
A pulp mill
It spent a century in paper, rubber boots and cables before phones; the company still takes its name from the Nokianvirta river.
Q 25Samsung began life in 1938 as a small trading firm dealing in what?
Dried fish and noodles
Lee Byung-chul's Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu did not make electronics until 1969.
Q 26Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search project was originally called what before it became Google?
BackRub
The name referred to the way it analysed the web's 'back links'; it ran on Stanford servers from 1996.
Q 27Under what name did Jeff Bezos originally found Amazon in 1994?
Cadabra
The name lasted only a matter of months before Bezos renamed the online bookstore after the world's largest river.
Q 28What was the first item ever sold on eBay?
A broken laser pointer
It went for $14.83 in 1995; when founder Pierre Omidyar checked, the buyer said he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 29Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from what?
A 10th-century Danish king
Harald Bluetooth united the Danish tribes, and the engineers wanted a standard that united devices; the logo merges his runic initials.
Q 30The shortest war in recorded history, in 1896, was fought between Britain and which state?
Zanzibar
It lasted somewhere between 38 and 45 minutes, ending when the sultan's palace was shelled and he fled to the German consulate.