Animal Trivia Questions: 45 With Checked Answers

How to Run an Animal Quiz

Each round has ten questions. Questions marked (Hard) need a specific name or detail, so drop them for younger players or save them for the last round. Every answer comes with a short note, because the note is usually the part people repeat after the game.

Read each question twice and allow about thirty seconds. When someone insists on a different answer, the note shows where ours comes from, and the References list at the end links to every page we used.

For another activity or a general-knowledge round, see fun trivia questions for adults and how to draw a dog.

Award one point for each complete answer in the four main rounds, for a maximum of 40 points. The five numerical tiebreakers are separate. Announce any accepted approximation before reading a question; lock in answers before moving on, and reveal notes after the round.

Round 1: Mammals

This round compares mammal anatomy, feeding and family relationships.

1. The giant panda grips bamboo with a "pseudo thumb." What is it actually made of? (Hard)
   Answer: An elongated, enlarged wrist bone covered with a fleshy pad of skin, according to Smithsonian's National Zoo. [1]
2. Cheetahs are the fastest land mammal. Which big-cat sound can they not make?
   Answer: A roar. Cheetahs purr, bark, growl, hiss and chirp instead. [2]
3. In a naked mole-rat colony, how many females breed?
   Answer: One, the queen. The species is eusocial, so the other members spend their lives working for the colony. [3]
4. About how often does a two-toed sloth climb down to defecate?
   Answer: About once a week, at regular spots at the base of trees. Its metabolism is that slow. [4]
5. Which Australian mammal has males with a venomous spur on their ankles?
   Answer: The platypus. The Australian Museum calls it one of the few venomous mammals. [11]
6. Platypuses and echidnas share an order of mammals with one trait no other mammals have. What is it?
   Answer: They lay eggs. The group is called the monotremes. [11]
7. People often say "koala bear." What kind of mammal is a koala really?
   Answer: A marsupial. The young grow in the mother's pouch, and the adults live on the leaves of certain eucalypts. [12]
8. How many vertebrae does a giraffe have in its neck?
   Answer: Seven, the same number as a human, according to San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. [17]
9. Which animal is the only close living relative of the giraffe? (Hard)
   Answer: The okapi, a rainforest animal whose striped legs make people think of a zebra. [18]
10. Polar bear fur looks white. What are the hairs really like?
    Answer: Clear, hollow tubes filled with air. Oils and sunlight can make the coat look cream or yellow. [19]

Round 2: Birds

Half of this round comes from Australia and New Zealand, where birds do things nobody expects. The other half stays closer to home.

1. Where are a kiwi's nostrils?
   Answer: Near the tip of its long bill. The National Zoo says that is unique in the bird world. [5]
2. For a North Island brown kiwi, about what percentage of the female’s body weight is one egg, on average? (Hard)
   Answer: About 15 percent, according to Smithsonian’s National Zoo. For this estimating question, the host may accept 10 to 20 percent if that range is announced before play. [5]
3. Where does a flamingo's pink or red color come from?
   Answer: Its food, including algae and shrimp. [6]
4. Which bird can fly up, down, sideways, backward and even upside down?
   Answer: The hummingbird. Its wings move in a figure-eight when it hovers. [20]
5. What is the smallest bird in the world, and on which island does it live?
   Answer: The bee hummingbird, from Cuba. [20]
6. Why does an owl turn its whole head to follow prey?
   Answer: Its eyes are so large for its head that there is little room for eye muscles, so it cannot move them. [21]
7. Which Australian bird can imitate chainsaws, car engines and barking dogs?
   Answer: The superb lyrebird. About 80 percent of its song is mimicry. [14]
8. The laughing kookaburra is not really laughing. What is its famous call for?
   Answer: It is a territorial call that warns other birds to stay away. [15]
9. In emus, which parent incubates the eggs?
   Answer: The male. [16]
10. Which bird has the largest wingspan in North America?
    Answer: The California condor, one of the largest flying birds in the world. [22]

Round 3: Ocean Life

Most answers here come from NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manage these species in U.S. waters. Expect a few surprises about what counts as an animal, a crab or a tooth.

1. Is coral an animal, a plant or a rock?
   Answer: An animal. [28]
2. In seahorses, which parent carries the developing young in a brood pouch?
   Answer: The male. [29]
3. What is the largest turtle in the world?
   Answer: The leatherback sea turtle. Adults can weigh 750 to 1,000 pounds. [30]
4. What makes the leatherback different from every other sea turtle?
   Answer: It lacks scales and a hard shell. [30]
5. Which whale is the largest of the toothed whales?
   Answer: The sperm whale. It hunts squid and fish on deep dives that routinely reach 2,000 feet. [31]
6. The killer whale, or orca, is the largest member of which family?
   Answer: The dolphin family. [32]
7. A narwhal’s long tusk is actually a modified what?
   Answer: A tooth. In males, the left tooth in the upper jaw usually grows forward into the tusk. [33]
8. Is the horseshoe crab a true crab?
   Answer: No. It belongs to an ancient group of arthropods closely related to spiders and scorpions. [36]
9. What color does horseshoe crab blood turn when it meets a lot of oxygen? (Hard)
   Answer: Blue. The copper-based blood starts out straw-colored. [36]
10. Sea otters lack the thick blubber layer used by many other marine mammals. What helps keep them warm?
    Answer: Dense fur and a high metabolism. [37]

Round 4: Reptiles, Amphibians and Insects

The cold-blooded round. It travels from Indonesia to Mexico City and ends in the Great Smoky Mountains.

1. What is the largest living lizard in the world?
   Answer: The Komodo dragon, found only on a few Indonesian islands. [7]
2. What specialized gland have researchers found in a Komodo dragon’s lower jaw? (Hard)
   Answer: A venom gland. [7]
3. What is the largest lizard native to the United States?
   Answer: The Gila monster, according to Smithsonian’s National Zoo. [43]
4. What can a chameleon do with its eyes that we cannot?
   Answer: Move and focus each eye separately, so it can look at two things at once. [23]
5. Which Mexican salamander is known for retaining feathery external gills into adulthood?
   Answer: The axolotl. [24]
6. How far can eastern monarch butterflies fly each fall to reach their winter sites in Mexico?
   Answer: More than 2,000 miles, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. [38]
7. Monarchs taste bad to predators. Where do their toxins come from?
   Answer: Milkweed plants. Their bright colors act as a warning. [38]
8. Two crocodilian species are native to the United States. Where is the only place both live together?
   Answer: South Florida, home of the American alligator and the American crocodile. [40]
9. How can you spot an American crocodile with its mouth closed? (Hard)
   Answer: Look for the fourth tooth on each side of the lower jaw, which stays visible, plus a narrow triangular snout. [40]
10. In fireflies that use flashing courtship signals, what do distinct flash patterns help them do?
    Answer: So males and females of the same species can find each other to mate. Great Smoky Mountains National Park alone has 19 firefly species. [42]

Five Closest-Number Tiebreakers

Each tied team writes a number in the requested unit. Compare absolute distance from the stated answer, using the specified rounding for the depth question. Equal distances continue to the next tiebreaker; if still tied after all five, share the result.

1. In what year did Sisquoc, the first California condor hatched in a zoo, hatch at San Diego Zoo?
   Answer: 1983. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance records the date as March 30. [22]
2. How many known bald-eagle nesting pairs were recorded in the lower 48 contiguous US states in 1963?
   Answer: 417, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. [44]
3. How many California condors survived in the wild in 1982?
   Answer: 22. [22]
4. According to NOAA, approximately how deep can a leatherback turtle dive? Give feet, rounded to the nearest 1,000 feet.
   Answer: 4,000 feet. Use that rounded reference for this tiebreaker. [30]
5. NOAA says some humpback whales complete the roughly 3,000-mile Alaska-to-Hawaii trip in as few as how many days?
   Answer: 28 days. This is the agency’s reported example, not a minimum for every migration. [34]

A note on what is missing: we dropped a few questions that often appear in animal quizzes because the official pages we checked did not support them clearly, or gave two different numbers on the same page. If a player brings one up, it makes a good debate, but it will not cost anyone a point here.