The Animal Kingdom Pub Quiz

Round 1Animal kingdom

Quickfire natural-history trivia. ten questions.

1. What is the only mammal capable of true flight?
2. What is the fastest land animal?
3. Which bird lays the largest eggs?
4. What is a group of crows called?
5. What is the largest animal ever known to have lived?
6. Name a mammal that lays eggs.
7. How many wings does a bee have?
8. Which land mammal has the longest pregnancy?
9. Butterflies taste with which part of their body?
10. What do giant pandas mostly eat?

Round 2Close-up

A tiny zoomed-in patch. What's the full picture? eight questions.

eight close-up pictures on screen, each a tiny patch of something familiar.

Round 3Fact or fiction

Myths and true-but-weird facts. Teams write Fact or Fiction. ten questions.

1. Shaving makes hair grow back thicker.
2. Tomatoes are botanically a fruit.
3. Ostriches bury their heads in the sand when scared.
4. Water always drains in opposite directions in the two hemispheres.
5. The human body has about as many bacterial cells as human cells.
6. Lemmings jump off cliffs in mass suicide.
7. Sound cannot travel through space.
8. Different areas of the tongue taste different flavours.
9. Octopuses can taste with their arms.
10. Old window glass is thicker at the bottom because glass slowly flows.

Round 4Animal kingdom

Quickfire natural-history trivia. ten questions.

1. What is the largest living species of big cat?
2. What is a baby kangaroo called?
3. Which is the only bird that can fly backwards?
4. What type of animal is a Komodo dragon?
5. What is the tallest land animal?
6. Which sea creature has three hearts and blue blood?
7. What is a group of flamingos called?
8. Which continent has no native ants?
9. Which mammal is the slowest-moving?
10. Which animal has fingerprints almost identical to a human's?

Round 5Emoji science

Read the emoji, name the science word or phrase. eight questions.

1. 🐝🏠
2. 🐴🌊
3. 🌙💡
4. ☀️⚡
5. 🍎🌳
6. 🧈🪰
7. 🐱🐟
8. 🔥🪰

Round 6Who am I? Scientists

Three clues, hardest first. 3 points after clue 1, 2 after clue 2, 1 after clue 3. six questions.

1. Clue 1: I was born exactly 300 years after Galileo died. Clue 2: I held the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, once held by Newton. Clue 3: I wrote A Brief History of Time.
2. Clue 1: I won an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. Clue 2: I studied the colour patterns in maize kernels. Clue 3: I discovered transposons, or "jumping genes".
3. Clue 1: I was Swedish and trained as a physician. Clue 2: I began naming each species with two Latin words. Clue 3: I am known as the father of modern taxonomy.
4. Clue 1: I was born in what is now Croatia. Clue 2: I worked briefly for Edison, then championed alternating current. Clue 3: The SI unit of magnetic flux density is named after me.
5. Clue 1: I used X-ray crystallography on penicillin and later on insulin. Clue 2: I worked out the structure of vitamin B12. Clue 3: I won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
6. Clue 1: I was a German meteorologist who led expeditions to Greenland. Clue 2: I was mocked because I could not explain what moves the continents. Clue 3: I proposed continental drift.

Round 7Animal kingdom

Quickfire natural-history trivia. ten questions.

1. What is the largest species of penguin?
2. What is a baby swan called?
3. How many chambers does a cow's stomach have?
4. What is the largest land carnivore?
5. What is a group of owls called?
6. How many eyes does a typical spider have?
7. What is the largest living rodent?
8. Which microscopic animal, nicknamed the water bear, can survive the vacuum of space?
9. Which flightless bird is New Zealand's national symbol?
10. What is a female fox called?

Round 8Closest wins

Estimation questions. Nearest team wins the point. Doubles as the tiebreaker. four questions.

1. How many litres of blood does an average adult have?
2. How deep is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, in metres?
3. How many days does the Moon take to orbit the Earth once?
4. How long can a blue whale grow, in metres?

HandoutRiddles and puzzles

Little brain-teasers. Best as the handout teams chip away at all quiz long. eight questions.

1. I fly without wings and cry without eyes. What am I?
2. What gets wetter the more it dries?
3. Which weighs more: a kilogram of iron or a kilogram of feathers?
4. I am tall when I am young and short when I am old. What am I?
5. A cell divides in two every hour. Starting from one cell, how many hours until there are 64?
6. What has hands but cannot clap?
7. What can travel round the world while staying in a corner?
8. I have keys but no locks and space but no room. What am I?