Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
97 free Animal Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kids animal trivia should be built for curious 7- to 12-year-olds, and these 44 free easy animal trivia questions with answers are: which animal has a black tongue, who keeps a penguin egg warm all winter, why flamingos are pink, and how many teeth a great white shark carries around. The quiz mixes the classics every child should know (fastest runner, biggest animal ever, what a baby kangaroo is called) with genuinely surprising facts about sloths, axolotls, sea otters, chameleons and polar bears. Nothing scary, nothing gory, just the strange and wonderful side of the animal kingdom. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so it is safe for a classroom, a car ride, a zoo trip or a family quiz night where the kids get to beat the grown-ups.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal is the fastest runner on land?
Cheetah
A cheetah can sprint at around 60 miles per hour, faster than any other animal on land. It can only keep that speed up for about half a minute before it has to stop and rest.
Q 02What is the largest animal that has ever lived on Earth?
Blue whale
Blue whales grow up to about 100 feet long and can weigh as much as 200 tons. No dinosaur we know of ever got that big.
Q 03Which animal is the tallest one alive on land today?
Giraffe
A giraffe's long neck lifts its head far above every other land animal. That height lets it reach leaves near the tops of trees that nothing else can nibble.
Q 04How many hearts does an octopus have?
3
One main heart pumps blood around the body, and two smaller hearts push blood through the gills. The number eight belongs to its arms, not its hearts.
Q 05Which animals are the only mammals that can truly fly?
Bats
Bats flap their wings and stay in the air as long as they like. Flying squirrels, sugar gliders and colugos only glide downwards using flaps of skin.
Q 06What is a baby kangaroo called?
Joey
A joey is tiny when it is born and finishes growing inside its mother's pouch, called a marsupium.
Q 07Which bird is the heaviest and largest in the world?
Ostrich
An ostrich can weigh over 300 pounds and lays the biggest eggs of any living land animal. It cannot fly, but it can run about 43 miles per hour.
Q 08What does a camel really store inside its hump?
Fat
The hump is a big store of fatty tissue the camel can burn for energy when food is hard to find. Lots of people think it holds water, but it does not.
Q 09What do we call a group of lions living together?
A pride
A pride is made up of related lionesses, their cubs, and a small number of adult males.
Q 10The tallest and heaviest penguin lives only on which continent?
Antarctica
The emperor penguin is the biggest penguin of all, and it is found nowhere on Earth except Antarctica.
Q 11What is the smallest bird in the world?
Bee hummingbird
The bee hummingbird of Cuba is only about 2.4 inches long and weighs roughly 2 grams, which is lighter than a single coin.
Q 12How many legs does a spider have?
8
Spiders are arthropods with eight limbs. Insects such as ants and beetles have six, which is one way to tell them apart.
Q 13How many arms do most starfish have?
5
Most starfish have five arms spreading out from a middle disc, though some species grow many more.
Q 14Which of these sea creatures is a mammal, not a fish?
Q 21How does a honey bee, back from foraging, tell the rest of the hive which direction the flowers are in?
By doing a dance
By doing a dance, the 'waggle dance', a bee encodes the direction and distance of the food; a queen bee, meanwhile, can lay up to 2,000 eggs in a single day.
Q 22A koala is not really a bear, so what kind of animal is it?
A marsupial
A koala is a marsupial: like kangaroos, koala mothers carry their babies in a pouch, and a koala can sleep as much as 20 hours a day.
Q 23About how many teeth does a great white shark have in its mouth at once?
300
A great white shark has about 300 teeth in its mouth at once, set in rows like a conveyor belt; new ones move forward to replace any that break or fall out.
Dolphin
Dolphins are aquatic mammals. They breathe air through a blowhole and feed their babies milk, while sharks and tuna are fish that use gills.
Q 15Which animal is the heaviest one living on land?
African bush elephant
The African bush elephant is the heaviest land animal alive: a fully grown bull stands about 10 to 11 feet at the shoulder and weighs around 6 tons.
Q 16About how often does a sloth climb down from its tree to poop?
Once every eight days
A sloth comes down about once every eight days, roughly once a week, to poop at the base of its tree. The slow, exposed trip is one of the most dangerous things it ever does.
Q 17Why are flamingos pink?
Pigments in the food they eat
Flamingos are pink because of pigments in the food they eat: carotenoids in the plankton and brine shrimp they filter from the water. A flamingo on a poor diet turns pale.
Q 18Which lizard can point each of its eyes in a different direction at the same time?
Chameleon
A chameleon's eyes move independently, so one can watch for danger while the other tracks a bug. Its tongue can then shoot out up to about twice its body length in a fraction of a second.
Q 19In emperor penguins, who keeps the egg warm through the Antarctic winter?
The father, on top of his feet
The male tucks the egg under a flap of skin and stands through the winter for over two months while the female is out at sea feeding.
Q 20Which of these can an elephant NOT do?
Jump
Jumping, trotting and galloping are all off the table because an elephant's legs are built for carrying weight; it can swim for hours, though.
Q 24How far can an owl turn its head?
About 270 degrees
An owl can turn its head about 270 degrees because its eyes are fixed in their sockets and cannot swivel the way ours do; 14 neck vertebrae, twice ours, make the twist possible.
Q 25What colour is a polar bear's skin under all that white fur?
Black
The dark skin soaks up warmth from the sun, and the fur on top is actually see-through rather than white.
Q 26Which animal can regrow a whole leg if it loses one?
Axolotl
The axolotl, a salamander from lakes near Mexico City, can regrow a whole leg, and it keeps its feathery gills its whole life instead of growing out of them.
Q 27Which animal has the densest fur of any creature on Earth?
Sea otter
The sea otter has the densest fur of any animal, up to about 150,000 hairs per square centimetre, and it cracks shellfish open by hammering them on a rock balanced on its chest.
Q 28Are any two zebras striped exactly the same?
No, every zebra's pattern is unique
No two zebras share a pattern: every zebra's stripes are unique, like a fingerprint, and one leading idea is that the stripes confuse biting flies.
Q 29Which is the only kind of bird that can fly backwards?
Hummingbird
The hummingbird is the only bird that can truly fly backwards: its wings rotate like helicopter blades, and its heart can beat more than 1,200 times a minute while it hovers at a flower.
Q 30Which of these furry animals lays eggs instead of giving birth to live babies?
Platypus
The platypus is one of only five living mammal species that lay eggs; the other four are all echidnas. When the first specimen reached Britain, scientists suspected a hoax.