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Natural History Quiz


Quiz Questions


  1. Which species of bear is the largest in the world?
  2. What is the name for the layer of the Earth where all life exists?
  3. In 1937, a team of workmen digging within the old moat at the Tower of London made a strange discovery: a pair of skulls from which beasts?
  4. The dodo, an extinct flightless bird, was endemic to which island?
  5. English biologist Sir Richard Owen is probably best remembered today for coining which word?
  6. Monotremes are the only group of living mammals that do what?
  7. Which period did the Tyrannosaurus rex live in?
  8. Which naturalist developed the theory of evolution by natural selection?
  9. The last Scottish what was killed by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel in 1680 in Perthshire?
  10. Sequoia sempervirens is what type of long-lived tree?
  11. What is the scientific name for the study of fossils?
  12. What occurred in the Atacama Desert in 1971 for the first time in 400 years?
  13. What animal was called "cameleopard" until the late 19th century?
  14. The first verifiable release into the British wild was in 1876 when a Victorian banker released a pair he’d brought back from a business trip to America into Henbury Park, near Macclesfield in Cheshire. What animal was it?
  15. What is "Hope," a 25.2-meter-long skeleton suspended in the Hintze Hall of the Natural History Museum in London?
  16. What is the alternative name for Uluru?
  17. The first known carbonaceous chondrite to have been found in the UK was in the Winchcombe area of Gloucestershire in 2021. What is it?
  18. The coco de mer has the largest what of any plant?
  19. What is the better-known name of the thylacine, a type of marsupial that once lived in Australia about 2,000 years ago?
  20. Mastodons were prehistoric relatives of which modern animals?
  21. Together with an Asian people known as Denisovans, what are our closest ancient human relatives?
  22. Which bird holds the record for the largest wingspan for a seabird?
  23. What is the name of the supercontinent that existed around 335 to 175 million years ago, before it broke into the continents we know today?
  24. What is the term for the scientific study of insects?
  25. Which extinct species is considered the ancestor of modern birds?
  26. Which species of bird is known for migrating the longest distance annually?
  27. What type of volcanic rock, starting with 'B', is formed from the solidification of molten lava?
  28. In Orkney, which large shark species is called "hoe-mother," meaning "the mother of the piked dogfish"?
  29. Which fish has eyes on top of its head, can breathe air through its skin or mouth, and, most astonishingly, can walk on land?
  30. What are ladybirds called in North America?


Answers


  1. Polar bear
  2. Biosphere
  3. African lions
  4. Mauritius
  5. Dinosaur
  6. Lay eggs
  7. Cretaceous Period
  8. Charles Darwin
  9. Wolf
  10. Redwood
  11. Paleontology
  12. A rainfall event occurred, causing a rare floral bloom in the Atacama Desert for the first time in 400 years.
  13. Giraffe
  14. Grey squirrels
  15. A blue whale (a female blue whale found stranded in Ireland in 1891)
  16. Ayers Rock (also known as Uluru)
  17. A meteorite (Carbonaceous chondrites are particularly special because they are essentially the leftover building blocks of our Solar System.)
  18. Seeds
  19. The Tasmanian tiger (also known as the thylacine)
  20. Elephants
  21. Neanderthals
  22. Albatrosses
  23. Pangaea
  24. Entomology
  25. Archaeopteryx
  26. Arctic Tern
  27. Basalt
  28. Basking shark
  29. Mudskippers
  30. Ladybugs