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60 free Carl Linnaeus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Carl Linnaeus is the reason a lion is Panthera leo and you are Homo sapiens. This Carl Linnaeus trivia quiz covers his whole life: the curate's son from Småland who nearly became a cobbler's apprentice, the second-year student lecturing to crowds of 300, the six-month trek through Lapland, and the two books (Systema Naturae and Species Plantarum) that still mark the starting points of zoological and botanical naming. You will also meet the stranger corners of his story: the seven-headed hydra he exposed as a fake in Hamburg, the temperature scale he flipped upside down, the coat of arms with an egg on it, and the 17 'apostles' he sent around the world while never leaving Sweden again himself. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer is verified against and cited to the relevant reference page, so you can trust what you learn. If you enjoy this one, try our other science and history quizzes.
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Q 01Which country was Carl Linnaeus born in?
Sweden
He was born in 1707 in Råshult, a village in Småland in the south of the country. He later became a professor at Uppsala.
Q 02Which naming system did Linnaeus formalise for organisms?
Binomial nomenclature
Each species gets a two-part Latin name, genus plus species, such as Homo sapiens. The system replaced long descriptive Latin phrases.
Q 03Linnaeus is popularly known as the father of which discipline?
Modern taxonomy
His hierarchical scheme of kingdoms, classes, orders, genera and species is the ancestor of the classification biologists use today.
Q 04What name did Linnaeus take after his ennoblement in 1761?
Carl von Linné
'Linné' was a shortened, gallicised form of Linnæus, with the German nobiliary particle 'von' added to mark his new rank.
Q 05What abbreviation marks Linnaeus as the authority for a plant name?
L.
A single letter is enough because no other botanist gets one; in zoology his full surname is more common, and older works use 'Linn.'
Q 06Which species is Linnaeus himself designated the type specimen of?
Homo sapiens
In 1959 W. T. Stearn made him the lectotype of our own species, since the only specimen he was known to have examined was himself.
Q 07What was the profession of Linnaeus's father, Nils?
Lutheran curate
Nils was an amateur botanist as well as a clergyman, and gave the boy his own patch of garden to grow plants in.
Q 08The family surname Linnæus honours which kind of plant?
A lime (linden)
Nils needed a surname to enrol at Lund University and Latinised lind, the Swedish for the giant tree on the family homestead.
Q 09When Linnaeus neglected school, what trade did his father consider apprenticing him to?
Cobbler
His headmaster noticed the boy's interest in botany and instead introduced him to the doctor Johan Rothman, who steered him toward medicine.
Q 10At which university did Linnaeus first enrol, in 1727?
Lund
He moved to Uppsala a year later on Rothman's advice, because its medical faculty was better suited to studying both medicine and botany.
Q 11How large an audience did Linnaeus's early Uppsala botany lectures often draw?
300
He was only a second-year student when Olof Rudbeck the Younger picked him to lecture in May 1730.
Q 12On what feature did Linnaeus base his new plant classification system?
Number of stamens and pistils
His 'sexual system' sorted plants by their reproductive parts, replacing Tournefort's method he had been taught.
Q 13Which region did Linnaeus explore on his six-month expedition of 1732?
Lapland
He set off from Uppsala just before his 25th birthday and covered more than 2,000 km, describing about 100 previously unidentified plants.
Q 21In what year was the first edition of Systema Naturae published?
1735
The first edition was a mere twelve pages, printed in the Netherlands with money from Gronovius and the Scottish doctor Isaac Lawson.
Q 22How many pages long was the first edition of Systema Naturae?
12
By its 10th edition in 1758 the work classified 4,400 animal species and 7,700 plant species.
Q 23For whom did Linnaeus work as physician and garden superintendent at Hartekamp?
George Clifford III
His employer was a director of the Dutch East India Company; Linnaeus called his years there 'the happiest time of my life'.
Q 14Which plant, found near Gävle, became Linnaeus's favourite?
Twinflower
Later named Linnaea borealis in his honour, it also appears prominently on his noble coat of arms.
Q 15Which Indigenous people did Linnaeus study on his 1732 northern journey?
The Sami
He also studied lichens, a main part of the diet of the reindeer that the herders depended on.
Q 16Which book grew out of Linnaeus's 1732 northern expedition?
Flora Lapponica
It covered 534 species and has been called the first proto-modern Flora, mixing botany with notes on local culture.
Q 17In which city did Linnaeus expose a taxidermied seven-headed hydra as a fake?
Hamburg
The mayor's prized specimen was stitched from weasel jaws and snake skins, and Linnaeus and his companion had to flee the city.
Q 18At which Dutch university did Linnaeus earn his medical doctorate in 1735?
Harderwijk
The university was known for granting degrees in as little as a week; Linnaeus finished his oral and practical exams within two weeks.
Q 19Which disease did Linnaeus's doctoral dissertation link to clay-rich soils?
Malaria
He missed the mosquito, but correctly predicted that Artemisia annua would become a source of treatments for the disease.
Q 20How did Linnaeus's friend Peter Artedi die in 1735?
Drowned in an Amsterdam canal
The two had promised that the survivor would finish the other's work; Artedi left an unfinished manuscript on classifying fish.
Q 24Which London site did Linnaeus visit in 1736 to meet its keeper Philip Miller?
Chelsea Physic Garden
Miller was slow to adopt the new system and only fully switched his Gardeners Dictionary to Linnaean names in 1768.
Q 25Which pitcher-plant genus was first named in Hortus Cliffortianus?
Nepenthes
The book catalogued Clifford's holdings; Linnaeus wrote it in nine months but it was not published until 1738.
Q 26After returning home in 1738, how often did Linnaeus travel abroad again?
Never
His system spread worldwide instead through his students, the so-called apostles, who travelled on his behalf.
Q 27Which learned society did Linnaeus help found while working in Stockholm?
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
He became its first president, or Praeses, by the drawing of lots.
Q 28What was the name of Linnaeus's wife?
Sara Elisabeth Moræa
They became engaged in Falun in 1738 and married in June 1739, once his finances as a physician could support a family.
Q 29Which temperature scale did Linnaeus invert to its modern form in 1745?
Celsius
Anders Celsius originally set water boiling at 0 degrees and freezing at 100; Linnaeus flipped it the way we use it today.
Q 30What did Linnaeus call his most promising students who travelled the world?
Apostles
There were 17 of them, and seven died on their expeditions, including the first, the pastor Christopher Tärnström.