Q 01/05

On which Indian Ocean island did the dodo live before vanishing within a century of Dutch sailors arriving?

A) Réunion

B) Mauritius

C) Seychelles

D) Zanzibar

Answer · why

B) Mauritius

Mauritius was the dodo's only home, and the last widely accepted sighting came in 1662, just 64 years after Dutch sailors first recorded the bird.

Q 02/05

Which striped marsupial predator died out when its last known animal perished at a Hobart zoo in 1936?

A) Tasmanian tiger

B) Tasmanian devil

C) Marsupial lion

D) Tiger quoll

Answer · why

A) Tasmanian tiger

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, won official protection just 59 days before the last known one died in captivity.

Q 03/05

Which North American bird once flew in flocks of billions before the last one died in a zoo in 1914?

A) Eskimo curlew

B) Ivory-billed woodpecker

C) Passenger pigeon

D) Labrador duck

Answer · why

C) Passenger pigeon

The passenger pigeon numbered three to five billion at its peak and may have been the most numerous bird on Earth. Martha, the last of her kind, died ...

Q 04/05

The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried in which country?

A) India

B) Australia

C) Canada

D) Mexico

Answer · why

D) Mexico

Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula hides the crater, which went unnoticed until geophysicists searching for petroleum mapped it in the late 1970s.

Q 05/05

Which fish, thought extinct for 66 million years, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

A) Lungfish

B) Coelacanth

C) Sturgeon

D) Alligator gar

Answer · why

B) Coelacanth

The coelacanth was spotted among a local fisherman's catch by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and the living genus Latimeria now carries he...