Q 01/05

Which 3.2-million-year-old Ethiopian fossil was nicknamed after a Beatles song played in the dig camp?

A) Michelle

B) Julia

C) Lucy

D) Eleanor

Answer · why

C) Lucy

Lucy is about 40% complete, and her bones showed that human ancestors walked upright long before their brains grew large.

Q 02/05

Which egg-laying Australian mammal did British scientists first judge to be a stitched-together fake?

A) Echidna

B) Sugar glider

C) Wombat

D) Platypus

Answer · why

D) Platypus

Platypus males also carry venomous spurs on their hind feet, one more oddity on an animal that looked like a duck's beak sewn onto a beaver.

Q 03/05

Which Ice Age mammal lingered on Russia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, long after vanishing elsewhere?

A) Cave bear

B) Woolly rhinoceros

C) Woolly mammoth

D) Irish elk

Answer · why

C) Woolly mammoth

Woolly mammoth herds also clung on at St. Paul Island until about 5,600 years ago, millennia after mainland Siberia's last ones died around 10,000 yea...

Q 04/05

Which plated dinosaur's tail spikes are informally called a thagomizer, a name invented in a 1982 Far Side cartoon?

A) Stegosaurus

B) Ankylosaurus

C) Triceratops

D) Iguanodon

Answer · why

A) Stegosaurus

Stegosaurus tail spikes had no name of their own until cartoonist Gary Larson's joke label was picked up by paleontologists.

Q 05/05

Which Indian Ocean island was the only home of the dodo, a flightless bird wiped out soon after sailors arrived?

A) Madagascar

B) Mauritius

C) Réunion

D) Zanzibar

Answer · why

B) Mauritius

Mauritius lost the dodo within about 65 years of Dutch sailors first recording the bird in 1598.