Weird Trivia
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129 free Weird trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 129 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?
Wombat
Wombat: its 2 cm cubes are thought to stay put on the rocks and logs where it marks territory, and the gut physics behind them won a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize.
Q 02Which animal has three hearts and blue blood?
Octopus
Octopus: two hearts pump blood through the gills and one round the body, and that main heart stops while it swims, which is why octopuses mostly crawl.
Q 03In which animal does the female deposit eggs into the male, who then gives birth?
Seahorse
The seahorse: the male carries the eggs in his pouch, expels the young with muscular contractions and can take in a new brood soon after.
Q 04Which fruit is a berry in the botanical sense?
Banana
Banana: a botanical berry grows from a single ovary, while a strawberry's 'seeds' are really its true fruits, dotted over swollen flower tissue.
Q 05What turns flamingos pink as they grow up?
Carotenoids in their food
Carotenoids in their food: the pigments come from algae and small crustaceans, and zoos sometimes add colouring to captive birds' diets so their feathers don't fade.
Q 06Roughly how often does a three-toed sloth climb down to the ground to relieve itself?
About once a week
About once a week: a three-toed sloth is nearly helpless on the ground, dragging itself along by its front claws, so each trip down leaves it exposed to predators.
Q 07Where are the taste receptors a female butterfly uses to test a leaf before laying eggs?
On its feet
On its feet: she stands on the leaf to taste whether her caterpillars can eat it, which matters because some species lay eggs on only one type of plant.
Q 08What shape are a goat's pupils?
Horizontal slits
Horizontal slits: they give a grazing goat a wide panoramic view for spotting predators, while their flattened shape cuts dazzle from the sun overhead.
Q 09What kind of tree is Pando, the single Utah organism with about 47,000 stems sharing one root system?
Quaking aspen
Quaking aspen: Pando weighs about 6,000 tonnes, and because deer and elk eat its new shoots, parts of it are fenced so young stems can grow.
Q 10How do wood frogs of the far north get through winter?
Their blood and tissues freeze
Their blood and tissues freeze: the frog's heart and breathing stop, and a natural antifreeze keeps ice out of its cells until it thaws in spring.
Q 11Which animal smashes its prey with a club-like limb, in one of the fastest strikes in nature?
Mantis shrimp
Mantis shrimp: its strike is so fast it creates cavitation bubbles in the water, and their collapse can add a second hit to the prey.
Q 12Which planet takes longer to spin once on its axis than to orbit the Sun?
Venus
Venus: one spin takes about 243 Earth days against a 224.7-day year, and because it spins backwards the Sun would rise in the west.
Q 13Which planet is less dense than water and would, given a big enough bathtub, float?
Saturn
Saturn: its average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, roughly 30% less than water, despite a mass 95 times Earth's.
Q 21The famous 'first actual case of bug being found' in a computer, in 1947, was literally what?
A moth
A moth: engineers had called machine faults 'bugs' since Thomas Edison's day, so the operators who taped it into the logbook were probably making a pun.
Q 22Which video game company was founded in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards?
Nintendo
Nintendo: it made playing cards for nearly 90 years before selling its first home video game machines in 1977.
Q 23Which phone maker began in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill?
Nokia
Nokia: the paper firm took its name from the town it moved to, and after a 1967 merger it made rubber and cables alongside electronics before phones took over.
Q 14Which body, discovered in 1930, has still not completed a single orbit of the Sun since it was found?
Pluto
Pluto: found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it takes about 248 years to circle the Sun, so its first full orbit since discovery will not finish until 2178.
Q 15What colour does the sky glow around the setting Sun on Mars?
Blue
Blue: fine Martian dust lets blue light pass through more efficiently, so blue stays close to the setting Sun while the wider sky turns rose.
Q 16What happens to many of a newborn's bones over time?
They fuse together
They fuse together: a newborn's skull bones are still separate, and flexible gaps between them let the head squeeze through the birth canal before they join.
Q 17Which is the only bone in the human body not joined to another bone?
Hyoid
The hyoid: muscles and ligaments hold it at the root of the tongue, and in adults a fractured hyoid is a key forensic sign of strangulation.
Q 18Which part of the human body has three lobes on the right but only two on the left?
The lungs
The lungs: the left lung is the smaller of the two, with a notch that leaves room for the heart.
Q 19The gene 'sonic hedgehog', which helps shape a growing embryo, is named after what?
A Sega video game character
A Sega video game character: Robert Riddle named it after Sonic the Hedgehog, and some doctors later found the jokey name awkward when counselling families about serious birth defects.
Q 20In 1991, Cambridge University computer scientists set up a camera to watch what, later putting its pictures on the web?
A coffee pot
A coffee pot: the camera saved people elsewhere in the building fruitless trips to an empty pot, and once online the pot became world famous.
Q 24Which electronics giant began in 1938 as a small Korean business exporting dried fish?
Samsung
Samsung: over the next three decades the trading firm spread into food processing, textiles and insurance before it moved into electronics.
Q 25Which search engine began as a Stanford research project called BackRub?
Google: BackRub judged pages by the links pointing to them, and the new name played on 'googol', a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Q 26Which online retailer was incorporated in 1994 under the name Cadabra?
Amazon
Amazon: Bezos renamed it within months, partly because the world's largest river suggested how big he hoped the store would grow.
Q 27Which online marketplace's first sale, in 1995, was a broken laser pointer?
eBay
eBay: when founder Pierre Omidyar asked if the buyer knew it was broken, he said he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 28Which wireless technology takes its name from a 10th-century king who united Denmark?
Bluetooth
Bluetooth: Intel's Jim Kardach proposed King Harald Bluetooth's nickname as a temporary code name, and it caught on before a formal name could replace it.
Q 29Which state fought Britain in 1896 in what is often called the shortest war in history?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar: a new sultan had taken the throne without British approval, so British warships shelled his palace, and the fighting was over in under an hour.
Q 30In 1932 the Australian Army took machine guns into the field against which animal, and lost?
Emus
Emus: in the 1932 'Emu War' the birds split into small fast groups, Major Meredith compared them to tanks, and the operation was abandoned amid public ridicule.