Woolly Mammoths Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Woolly Mammoths trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This woolly mammoths trivia quiz covers the best-studied prehistoric animal of all, thanks to frozen carcasses pulled out of Siberian permafrost. It starts with the animal itself: how big it was, how long its hair grew, why its ears were small, how many times it replaced its teeth, what it ate and how it kept its trunk warm. Then it looks at where and when it lived and died, from the mammoth steppe to the last herds on Wrangel Island 4,000 years ago, and at its cousins, from the giant steppe mammoth to the pygmy mammoths of California's Channel Islands. The rest is history and people: Cuvier's realisation that species can go extinct, the hunter who found the first documented carcass, the Explorers Club dinner that turned out to be turtle, cave paintings, bone huts and Venus figurines, the calves Lyuba, Yuka and Yana, and the genome, CRISPR and Colossal Biosciences story of trying to bring the animal back. There is even a question on Ice Age's Manny. Our dinosaurs and Ice Age quizzes cover the wider prehistoric world. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the woolly mammoth, the mammoth genus and related sites and species, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which living animal is the woolly mammoth's closest relative?
The Asian elephant
The Asian elephant: the three lineages split so close together that the question stayed open until 2006, when DNA from frozen mammoths put them beside Asian rather than African elephants.
Q 02Despite its giant reputation, how did a woolly mammoth compare in size with a modern African elephant?
About the same size
About the same size: big bulls stood around 3 metres at the shoulder, and the true giant of the family was its ancestor the steppe mammoth, about a metre taller.
Q 03Where did woolly mammoths survive longest, until roughly 2000 BCE?
Wrangel Island
Wrangel Island: mammoths were still grazing this Arctic outpost about 4,000 years ago, centuries after Egypt's Great Pyramid went up.
Q 04With no humans yet on Alaska's St. Paul Island, what probably finished off its mammoths about 5,600 years ago?
A shortage of fresh water
A shortage of fresh water: as seas rose the island shrank, some lakes were lost to the ocean and salt water seeped into the rest, leaving the herd to die of thirst.
Q 05Mainland woolly mammoths died out about 10,000 years ago, at the close of which ice-age epoch?
The Pleistocene
The Pleistocene: as the ice age closed, a warmer, wetter climate turned the dry grassland mammoths grazed into forest and bog, and human hunters added to the pressure.
Q 06Which French scientist first identified the mammoth in 1796 as an extinct species?
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier: by showing the bones matched no living elephant he made extinction a fact, at a time when some scholars still put Italian mammoth fossils down to Hannibal's war elephants.
Q 07What does the woolly mammoth's species name, primigenius, mean in Latin?
First-born
First-born: Blumenbach's 1799 name, 'the first-born elephant', beat a rival published months later by the very scientist who had shown the mammoth was extinct, and he later adopted it himself.
Q 08The Oxford English Dictionary traces 'mammoth', a beast known from remains dug out of the ground, to a Vogul word meaning what?
Earth-horn
Earth-horn: the word's origin is uncertain, but this reading fits what Siberians believed, that the beast whose remains they dug up burrowed underground like a mole.
Q 09Which US president helped turn 'mammoth' into an adjective meaning enormous?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson: in 1802 a Baptist congregation in Cheshire, Massachusetts sent him a cheese more than four feet across, and mocking reports of the 'Mammoth Cheese' spread the new adjective.
Q 10Which Ice Age beast, a different animal from the mammoth altogether, carries the confusing scientific name Mammut?
The American mastodon
The American mastodon: its family branched off well over 20 million years ago, long before any mammoth walked, so despite the likeness a mammoth was far closer kin to a living elephant than to a mastodon.
Q 11DNA studies show the woolly mammoth interbred with which North American species where their ranges met?
The Columbian mammoth
The Columbian mammoth: the two bred where they met, and million-year-old DNA has since shown the Columbian itself began as a hybrid, with about half its ancestry from the woolly line.
Q 12How were the woolly mammoth's ears and tail adapted to the cold?
They were short
They were short: with ears about the size of dinner plates and a stubby tail, a mammoth had far less exposed skin to lose heat or freeze than an elephant with its great ear flaps.
Q 13Which shaggy Sesame Street character resembles a woolly mammoth?
Mr. Snuffleupagus
Q 21The mammoth's haemoglobin carried three mutations that did what?
Improved oxygen delivery in the cold
Improved oxygen delivery in the cold: in 2010 scientists rebuilt the mammoth's haemoglobin from ancient DNA and showed it kept handing over oxygen at temperatures that slow an elephant's.
Q 22What did glands in the mammoth's skin secrete to help its coat repel water and insulate?
Oils
Oils: living elephants have all but lost the oil glands in their skin, yet preserved mammoth skin shows plenty of them, and their oils kept the woolly coat waterproof.
Q 23Woolly mammoths carried a reserve of what in a hump on their backs?
Fat
Mr. Snuffleupagus: for many years the adults on the street took him for Big Bird's imaginary friend, until the writers revealed him in 1985 so that children would trust grown-ups to believe them.
Q 14Why do scientists doubt that the orange-brown of preserved mammoth fur was its colour in life?
Pigment bleached during burial
Pigment bleached during burial: when scientists recovered a hair-colour gene from mammoth bone in 2006, it pointed to herds with both dark and light coats.
Q 15A woolly mammoth grew six sets of molars in its life; what happened when the last set wore out?
It slowly starved
It slowly starved: each new molar slid forward like a conveyor belt as the old one wore away, and the sixth set, arriving at about 30, had to last the rest of its life.
Q 16What did a woolly mammoth mainly eat?
Grasses and forbs
Grasses and forbs: DNA in frozen dung and stomachs shows protein-rich wildflowers were a big part of the menu, and one study blames their decline after the ice age for the mammoth's own.
Q 17Chemical traces show one Alaskan mammoth walked far enough in its 28 years to do what?
Circle the Earth almost twice
Circle the Earth almost twice: strontium from the plants it ate was laid down in layers like tree rings, so scientists could match each stretch of its life to the rocks it had walked over.
Q 18In Ice Age: The Meltdown, the mammoth Ellie is convinced she is which animal?
A possum
A possum: she was raised by a family of them, which is a blow to Manny, who had feared he was the last mammoth alive until she turned up.
Q 19Frozen mammoths such as Yuka have a fleshy widening partway up the trunk; what was it probably for?
Warming the bare tip
Warming the bare tip: the end of the trunk had no fur yet still had to root for food all winter, so the mammoth may have curled it into this pocket like a hand into a mitten.
Q 20The mammoth calf 'Lyuba', found in 2007, still had what in her stomach?
Milk
Milk: her mother's milk was still in her stomach, and her gut held adult dung, which she had probably eaten to pick up the microbes a calf needs to digest plants, as elephant calves do.
Fat: the hump was a larder for winters when grazing ran short, on top of a layer of fat under the skin, several centimetres thick, that helped keep the animal warm.
Q 24A newborn woolly mammoth weighed roughly the same as what?
A large adult man
A large adult man: about 90 kg, or 200 pounds. Frozen calves were all born in spring or summer, so with an elephant-length pregnancy of nearly two years, mating probably peaked in summer and autumn.
Q 25How were woolly mammoth family groups organised, like those of modern elephants?
Led by females
Led by females: that may be why about seven in ten mammoth fossils are male, since lone bulls with no matriarch to steer them more often blundered into bogs and crevasses.
Q 26The mammoth steppe once ran from Spain to Canada across which now-drowned land between Siberia and Alaska?
Beringia
Beringia: with so much water locked up in glaciers the sea fell by as much as 300 feet, exposing a grassy plain a thousand miles wide that mammoths, and later people, could walk across.
Q 27The 'Cave of the Hundred Mammoths', with more than 150 mammoths pictured on its walls, lies in which country?
France
France: the cave is Rouffignac in the Dordogne, and its mammoths lie so far inside the hillside that visitors now ride an electric train to reach them.
Q 28Ice Age hunters built circular huts using mammoth bones as foundations and what as the entrances?
Tusks
Tusks: the best-known huts turned up at Mezhyrich in Ukraine in 1965, when a farmer enlarging his cellar struck a mammoth jawbone and archaeologists found four bone houses some 15,000 years old.
Q 29The Venus of Brassempouy and Venus of Lespugue figurines were carved from what?
Mammoth ivory
Two spear throwers shaped like mammoths have also been found in France.
Q 30Which human relatives used mammoth bones for tools and building before modern humans arrived in Europe?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals: on Jersey they left great heaps of mammoth bones some 200,000 years ago, once read as whole herds stampeded off a cliff, a dramatic story later studies of the site have doubted.