Animal Kingdom Trivia Quiz: Test Your Wildlife Knowledge

Trivia Quizzes Science

Somewhere between eight and nine million species are estimated to share this planet with us, and the vast majority of them do things that sound made up the first time you hear them explained. There are animals that can regrow entire limbs, animals that survive being frozen solid, and one particular mammal that lays eggs despite being a mammal in every other respect. Nature didn’t just produce a handful of interesting creatures: it produced an entire planet’s worth of wildly different survival strategies, and most people only ever learn about a small fraction of them through documentaries and the occasional viral video.

A blue whale can reach roughly thirty metres and 150 tonnes, which makes it larger than any dinosaur ever confirmed from the fossil record, including the long-necked sauropods usually assumed to hold that title. Its heart weighs somewhere near 180 kilograms, its tongue alone outweighs a full-grown elephant, and a nursing calf puts on close to ninety kilograms a day on a diet of milk with a fat content several times that of cow’s milk. The whole animal runs on krill, a shrimp-like creature a few centimetres long, filtered by the tonne through baleen plates rather than teeth.

Speed records break down along similar lines once the numbers get specific. A cheetah can hit something around 100 kilometres per hour but holds it for roughly twenty to thirty seconds before overheating forces it to stop, which is why a failed chase costs it so much. The peregrine falcon reaches around 390 kilometres per hour in a stoop, making it the fastest animal on the planet by a wide margin, though only while falling. The Arctic tern sets a different kind of record, covering something on the order of 70,000 kilometres a year travelling between polar summers.

The egg-laying mammals are the platypus and the echidnas, the only surviving monotremes, and the platypus adds electroreception in its bill and a venomous spur on the males’ hind legs to an already unusual résumé. The axolotl regrows limbs, spinal tissue and portions of its heart, and keeps its larval gills for life rather than metamorphosing. Wood frogs in Alaska freeze nearly solid each winter, heart stopped, flooding their tissue with glucose to keep ice from destroying cells, then thaw and resume in spring.

An octopus runs three hearts and blue, copper-based blood, with two thirds of its neurons distributed through its arms rather than its head. A giraffe has exactly seven vertebrae in its neck, the same number as a human, each one simply enormous, and blood pressure roughly double ours to push blood upward. The collective nouns are their own category of oddity: a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a crash of rhinoceroses, a tower of giraffes standing still that becomes a journey once they start walking.

Questions here span records and measurements, classification and the species that complicate it, unusual anatomy, survival strategies, lifespans that stretch past a century in giant tortoises, and a few of those collective nouns. Some are the ones most people carry around already, like the fastest land animal or the tallest one. Others go narrower, asking how many hearts an octopus runs, which mammal lays eggs, or which amphibian regenerates lost limbs. Every question reappears below with its correct answer attached once the quiz is finished, which makes the gaps easy enough to find.