Wildlife
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7correct to beat the crowd
96 free Wildlife trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fifty free wild animal trivia questions with answers, from the savanna to the deep sea. The easy openers ask about the fastest land animal, the tallest, the largest bear and the only mammal that truly flies; the middle of the set gets into how dolphins sleep, why polar bear skin is black and which shark has to keep swimming; the hard end wants the loudest whale, the only primate with a toxic bite and the bison that was brought back from 48 zoo animals. It is a wildlife quiz rather than a pets-and-farm one, so expect Arctic terns, leafcutter ants, wildebeest, slow lorises, pistol shrimp and the IUCN Red List. Conservation gets its own thread: shark finning, the northern white rhino, monarch butterflies and the wolves that changed Yellowstone's rivers. Every answer is checked against a reference source, so the numbers and superlatives hold up when someone in the room says "actually".
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the fastest land animal in the world?
Cheetah
Cheetah sprints top out around 60 to 65 mph in short bursts; powerful hindlimbs, long legs and a flexible spine are all built for speed.
Q 02A newborn kangaroo is closest in size to which of these?
A jelly bean
A jelly bean: the newborn is only a couple of centimetres long, yet it climbs unaided through its mother's fur into the pouch, where it stays for months.
Q 03What is a group of wolves called?
Pack
Pack usually just means family: a breeding pair and their offspring, and the old idea of an 'alpha wolf' fighting its way to the top came from studies of unrelated captive wolves.
Q 04Puck, who set the Guinness record for bird vocabulary with 1,728 words, was which small pet bird?
Budgerigar
Budgerigar Puck, a pet owned by Camille Jordan in the United States, out-talked every big parrot on record; his estimated 1,728 words were logged before he died in 1994.
Q 05What is the largest species of bear?
Polar bear
Polar bear is the largest bear species and the biggest land carnivore, though Alaska's Kodiak brown bears can rival it; it is also the most carnivorous bear, living mainly on seals hunted from the sea ice.
Q 06Which of these animals has six legs?
Butterfly
Butterfly: like every insect it has six legs, though brush-footed butterflies keep the front pair so small and tucked up that they appear to stand on four.
Q 07Which ocean animal is known for having three hearts?
Octopus
Octopus hearts share the work: two small ones push blood through the gills to pick up oxygen, and a third, larger heart then sends it around the rest of the body.
Q 08How does a flamingo hold its head to feed?
Upside down
Upside down: a flamingo lowers its head until the bill is inverted, then pumps water in and out so that comb-like plates along the bill's edges strain out its food.
Q 09Which Australian marsupial is known for sleeping up to 20 hours a day?
Koala
Koalas sleep so much because eucalyptus leaves are tough, toxic and poor in energy; digesting them is slow, hard work that leaves little fuel for anything else.
Q 10What is the national bird of the United States?
Bald eagle
Bald eagle has appeared on the Great Seal since 1782, yet it had no official title until an eagle enthusiast spotted the gap and Congress made it the national bird in December 2024.
Q 11Which reptile has the strongest bite force ever measured?
Saltwater crocodile
Saltwater crocodile jaws clamped down with about 3,700 pounds of force in a 2012 study, the hardest bite measured in any living animal; bite force climbs with body size, and this is the largest living reptile.
Q 12Which ecosystems cover a tiny fraction of the sea floor yet shelter about a quarter of all marine species?
Coral reefs
Coral reefs are built by animals, not plants: colonies of tiny corals lay down hard limestone skeletons, and the crowd of life they shelter earns them the nickname 'rainforests of the sea'.
Q 13What is the largest living species of lizard?
Komodo dragon
Q 21Which sea turtle species is the largest?
Leatherback
Leatherback is the largest sea turtle, up to about two metres long, and a tireless traveller: some cross the whole Pacific from nesting beaches in Indonesia to feeding grounds off the US West Coast.
Q 22What adaptation allows owls to fly almost silently?
Specialized feather edges
Specialized feather edges do it: comb-like serrations on the leading edge, a soft fringe on the trailing edge and a velvety surface that break up turbulence.
Q 23Which organization publishes the Red List of Threatened Species?
IUCN
IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, sorts species into categories from Least Concern to Extinct, and governments, businesses and charities use those rankings to guide what gets protected.
Komodo dragon grows to about 3 metres; its lethal bite was long blamed on filthy, bacteria-laden saliva until researchers in 2009 showed it has venom glands in its lower jaw.
Q 14How do dolphins sleep without drowning?
They shut down half their brain at a time
They shut down half their brain at a time, so one hemisphere rests while the other keeps them surfacing to breathe and watching for predators.
Q 15Which species of shark must keep swimming to breathe?
Great white
Great white sharks are obligate ram ventilators: they must swim to force water over their gills, whereas bottom-dwellers such as nurse sharks can pump water with their cheek muscles and breathe lying still.
Q 16Which antelope makes up the bulk of East Africa's Great Migration, more than a million strong?
Wildebeest
Wildebeest, well over a million of them, circle between Tanzania's Serengeti and Kenya's Masai Mara each year, following the rains that bring fresh grass, with gazelles travelling alongside.
Q 17Like most of the world's bee species, which of these bees nests alone instead of in a colony?
Mason bee
Mason bee females each build and stock their own nest, walling off the cells with mud, with no queen and no workers; most bee species live this way, and honey-making hives are the exception.
Q 18Rather than for camouflage, chameleons mostly change colour to do what?
Signal to one another
Signal to one another: males flash brighter colours at rivals and mates and turn dark when they back down, and they also darken to soak up heat when they are cold.
Q 19In which country do all the world's wild bonobos live?
DR Congo
DR Congo, in full the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the only country with wild bonobos; they live in forests south of the Congo River, which cuts them off from chimpanzees to the north.
Q 20Besides the platypus, which Australian mammal lays eggs?
Echidna
Echidna mothers lay a single leathery egg into a pouch, and the hatchling, called a puggle, drinks milk that seeps from her skin because, like the platypus, she has no nipples.
Q 24What is the only mammal capable of true powered flight?
Bat
Bat wings are modified hands, with thin skin stretched between very long finger bones, so a bat can flap and truly fly while a flying squirrel can only glide.
Q 25What color is a polar bear's skin underneath its fur?
Black
Black skin absorbs heat from the sun; the fur only looks white because its transparent hairs scatter visible light, much as snow does.
Q 26Which eagle was officially called the monkey-eating eagle until 1978?
Philippine eagle
Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) was renamed from monkey-eating eagle by a 1978 presidential proclamation; it is the Philippines' national bird and critically endangered, with a wingspan of about two metres.
Q 27The harmless scarlet kingsnake copies the red, yellow and black bands of which venomous species?
Coral snake
Coral snake bands are a warning that predators learn to avoid, so a harmless lookalike gets left alone too; this bluff with borrowed colours is called Batesian mimicry.
Q 28Roughly one in four known animal species belongs to which group of insects?
Beetles
Beetles have front wings hardened into cases that shield the delicate flying wings folded beneath, which lets them push through soil, logs and leaf litter that would damage an unprotected wing.
Q 29Who narrated the BBC's 2006 series 'Planet Earth'?
David Attenborough
David Attenborough narrated the British original, but many American viewers heard actress Sigourney Weaver instead, because she voiced the version shown on the Discovery Channel.
Q 30What word sums up the variety of life in an ecosystem?
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is not spread evenly: it is richest in the tropics, where year-round warmth lets far more species live side by side, and thins out toward the poles.