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This big cat trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and covers all five Panthera species and the honorary big cats beside them: the lion and its pride, the tiger and its stripes and rivers, the leopard in its tree, the jaguar with its skull-crushing bite, the cheetah at full sprint, the snow leopard that cannot roar, the cougar with forty names, the clouded leopard that climbs down head-first, and the liger that outweighs both its parents. Easy questions ask which cat is fastest and what a group of lions is called. Medium ones ask how far a roar carries, which two big cats are sister species and how many hours a lion sleeps. The hard ones want the origin of the word jaguar, the Greek root of 'ounce', the year the Captive Wildlife Safety Act was signed and the exact weight of Hercules the liger. Good for classrooms, zoo trips and animal-themed pub quizzes. Every answer has been checked against the encyclopaedia entry for each species, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
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Q 01What is the highest reliably recorded running speed of a cheetah, the fastest land animal?
104 km/h
The best reliably measured sprint is 104 km/h (65 mph); the often-quoted 114 km/h figure came from a faulty measurement.
Q 02What is a group of lions called?
A pride
An average one has about 15 members: several related females, their cubs and up to four adult males.
Q 03The jaguar is the only living Panthera species native to which part of the world?
The Americas
Its ancestors probably crossed from Eurasia over the Bering land bridge in the Early Pleistocene.
Q 04Which of these cats has stripes rather than spots?
The tiger
Every tiger's stripe pattern is unique, and the stripes on the limbs and forehead run horizontally rather than vertically.
Q 05What is a 'black panther'?
A melanistic leopard or jaguar
In leopards the black coat comes from a recessive gene; Gabon's coat of arms uses one.
Q 06Cougar, puma, mountain lion, catamount and panther all refer to one cat. Which Guinness record does it hold?
Most names of any creature, over 40 in English
Guinness counts more than 40 names in English alone.
Q 07Why can the snow leopard not roar, unlike the other four Panthera cats?
Its vocal folds are too short
Its vocal folds are only 9 mm long and offer too little resistance to the airflow, even though it has the same partly ossified hyoid as its relatives.
Q 08The male lion's most recognisable feature is what?
Its mane
Maneless males have been recorded in Senegal, in Sudan's Dinder National Park and in Tsavo East, Kenya.
Q 09What is a liger?
The offspring of a male lion and a tigress
The reverse cross is a tigon; ligers usually grow larger than either parent, tigons do not.
Q 10The cougar is the largest member of the cat family able to do what?
Purr
It is a member of the Felinae subfamily, so it purrs like a house cat and cannot roar.
Q 11Which of these habits is the tiger famous for, unlike most cats?
Swimming across wide rivers
It will happily cross rivers up to 8 km wide, and Sundarbans tigers swim between mangrove islands.
Q 12Outside Africa, wild lions survive in only one country. Which?
India
The Asiatic lion clings on in and around Gir National Park in Gujarat.
Q 13What do the cheetah's black tear streaks connect?
The corners of the eyes and the mouth
The streaks run from the corners of the eyes down the nose, and the cat also has partly retractile claws without a protective sheath.
Q 21Where does the jaguar rank among the world's cat species by size?
Third, after the tiger and lion
Males can reach 1.85 m in body length and 158 kg.
Q 22A cheetah's most famous adaptation for speed apart from its legs is which body part?
A flexible spine
Powerful hindlimb muscles, long limbs and that bendy spine let it overtake a pronghorn with a 137 m head start.
Q 23Which predators threaten cheetah cubs and routinely steal adult cheetahs' kills?
Lions and hyenas
It is one reason the cheetah hunts by day, when the bigger night hunters are resting.
Q 14Roughly how much of their historic range have tigers lost since the early 20th century?
At least 93 percent
They are locally extinct in West and Central Asia, most of China, and on Java and Bali.
Q 15Where does a leopard sometimes drag its kill after an ambush?
Up a tree
It also climbs down head-first and spends much of the day resting on branches.
Q 16How many living species make up the genus Panthera?
Five
Tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard and snow leopard; the cheetah and cougar are 'big' but sit in the other subfamily, Felinae.
Q 17Which two Panthera species are each other's closest relatives, according to a 2010 genetic study?
The tiger and the snow leopard
The lion, leopard and jaguar form the other cluster, with lion and leopard splitting only about 2 million years ago.
Q 18From how far away can a lion's roar be heard in good conditions?
Around 8 km
The lion has the longest larynx of any cat, which gives it the most powerful roar.
Q 19For roughly how many hours a day is a lion inactive?
About 20
They walk for two hours and eat for about 50 minutes on an average day, with hunting peaking around dawn.
Q 20The jaguar has an unusual killing method for mammal prey. What is it?
Biting through the skull between the ears
The same bite force lets it crunch through turtle and tortoise shells.
Q 24An African cheetah subspecies was reintroduced to which country in 2022, decades after going extinct there?
India
Kuno had been shortlisted for the job as far back as 2009 for its dense prey.
Q 25The snow leopard is a 'sister species' of which other cat?
The tiger
Despite the name it is not a close relative of the leopard; the split from the tiger happened between 4.6 and 1.8 million years ago.
Q 26How many fatal snow leopard attacks on humans have been recorded?
None
Only three attacks of any kind are documented, one by a rabid animal and one by an old toothless one near Almaty.
Q 27Which mid-sized Asian cat can climb down a vertical tree trunk head first?
The clouded leopard
Its upper canines are about three times as long as the socket is wide, proportionally the longest of any living cat.
Q 28How high can a cougar leap from the ground into a tree?
About 5.5 metres
It has proportionally the largest hind legs of any cat, built for the leap onto the back of a deer.
Q 29Which lion population is famous for having prides with only a single adult male?
Tsavo
The same Kenyan region produced the notorious 1898 man-eaters, blamed for 28 recorded railway-worker deaths.
Q 30What causes the white lion's colour?
Leucism from a double recessive allele
White lions occur naturally around Kruger and Timbavati in South Africa, and are still bred in captivity.