Q 01/05

The dodo, a flightless bird last reliably seen in 1662, lived only on which Indian Ocean island?

A) Zanzibar

B) Mauritius

C) Sri Lanka

D) Socotra

Answer · why

B) Mauritius

Mauritius had no mammal predators, so the dodo probably nested on the ground. The pigs, rats and macaques that arrived with people plundered those nes...

Q 02/05

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

A) Mexico

B) India

C) Canada

D) Australia

Answer · why

A) Mexico

Mexico hides the crater under its Yucatán Peninsula, where geophysicists who were looking for petroleum found it in the late 1970s.

Q 03/05

Which North American bird, once flocking in the billions, died out when Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914?

A) Labrador duck

B) Ivory-billed woodpecker

C) Passenger pigeon

D) Eskimo curlew

Answer · why

C) Passenger pigeon

The passenger pigeon may once have been the most numerous bird on Earth, but intense hunting and the felling of its forests finished it within decades...

Q 04/05

Which striped marsupial predator died out in 1936, when the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo?

A) Tasmanian devil

B) Marsupial lion

C) Tiger quoll

D) Tasmanian tiger

Answer · why

D) Tasmanian tiger

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was blamed for killing sheep, and the island's government paid a bounty of one pound for each dead adult.

Q 05/05

Which Ice Age giant survived on Arctic Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago, after Egypt's Great Pyramid was built?

A) Woolly mammoth

B) Woolly rhinoceros

C) Cave lion

D) Giant ground sloth

Answer · why

A) Woolly mammoth

The woolly mammoth had vanished from the mainland by about 10,000 years ago, but an isolated island herd hung on for some 6,000 years more.