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58 free Caves trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Caves are where the oldest art, the strangest animals and some of the biggest empty spaces on Earth are hiding. This quiz goes underground on every continent. It starts with the basics: the rock that most caves are dissolved from, the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, the word for cave formations in general, and the science that studies all of it. Then the record-breakers, from Kentucky's Mammoth Cave and Vietnam's Sơn Đoòng to the Sarawak Chamber, the Miao Room and the two shafts in the Caucasus that go down more than two kilometres. The living caves follow: 20 million bats pouring out of a Texas sinkhole, glowworms in New Zealand, the olm that can fast for a decade, cave bears and troglobites, and a Romanian cave whose entire food chain runs on chemistry rather than sunlight. Human caves too: Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet, the Denisovans and Homo naledi, Derinkuyu's underground city, the Cave of Hira and the Cave of the Apocalypse, cheese ageing at Wookey Hole, and the 2018 rescue at Tham Luang. Easy questions suit anyone who has taken a show-cave tour; the expert tier reaches Qaqa Mach'ay, Sof Omar and the farmers who drained five ponds at Longyou. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the caves, formations and creatures involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. For single sites, our Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad Caverns, Wind Cave and cave paintings pages go deeper.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Most of the world's caves are formed by the slow dissolving of which rock?
Limestone
Limestone (calcium carbonate) dissolves in rainwater charged with carbonic acid, which eats along cracks and bedding planes; the resulting sinkhole-pocked landscape is called karst.
Q 02What is the name for the scientific study of caves?
Speleology
Speleology is the science; recreational exploration is caving, potholing or spelunking, and the name was coined by Émile Rivière in 1890.
Q 03What is the cave formation that grows up from the floor beneath a stalactite called?
Stalagmite
A stalagmite builds up from the floor where drips land; the mnemonic is that stalactites hold tight to the ceiling and stalagmites might reach it.
Q 04Which cave system in Kentucky has the greatest total length of surveyed passage of any in the world, over 675 km?
Mammoth Cave
Mammoth Cave, a national park since 1941 and a World Heritage Site since 1981, has more than 675 kilometres of mapped passage, far ahead of any other known cave.
Q 05In which country is Sơn Đoòng, the cave with the largest known passage in the world?
Vietnam
Sơn Đoòng, in Vietnam's Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, was found in 1990 by a local man searching for agarwood; he did not return with cavers until 2009.
Q 06Bracken Cave near San Antonio, Texas, is the summer home of the largest colony of which animals on Earth?
Mexican free-tailed bats
An estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats roost there from March to October, the largest known concentration of mammals anywhere.
Q 07Waitomo Cave in New Zealand is famous for a ceiling lit by thousands of what?
Glowworms
Waitomo's glowworms are the larvae of a fungus gnat found only in New Zealand, dangling sticky silk threads to snare prey drawn to the light.
Q 08What are cave visitors told to do to enter the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri?
Lie flat in a small rowboat
The entrance is barely a metre high, so boatmen have passengers lie flat in a small rowboat and pull through on a chain; Tiberius used the cave as a private swimming pool.
Q 09In 2018, twelve boys and their football coach were trapped for over two weeks in the Tham Luang cave in which country?
Thailand
The Wild Boars were trapped in Thailand's Tham Luang Nang Non cave from 23 June 2018; two British divers found them about four kilometres in, and all thirteen were sedated and dived out on 8-10 July.
Q 10The Paleolithic paintings of Lascaux, with its Hall of the Bulls, are in which country?
France
France's Lascaux cave was found in 1940 by an 18-year-old whose dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree; the original cave has been closed since 1963.
Q 11Which site in the Altai Mountains of Siberia gave its name to an extinct human species identified from a finger bone in 2010?
Denisova Cave
Denisova Cave's finger bone yielded the Denisovan genome in 2010; the site later produced a 50,000-year-old bone needle and 'Denny', a girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father.
Q 12Fingal's Cave, whose echoes inspired Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, is a sea cave on which Scottish island?
Staffa
Fingal's Cave is on the uninhabited isle of Staffa, off Mull; its hexagonal basalt columns match the Giant's Causeway, and Turner painted it in 1832.
Q 13Cave-dwelling animals such as blind fish and pale salamanders that cannot live outside caves are called what?
Troglobites
Q 21The Sarawak Chamber, the largest cave room by area, lies in Gunung Mulu National Park on which island?
Borneo
Gunung Mulu lies in Sarawak, the Malaysian part of Borneo; three visiting cavers found the chamber in 1981 and judged it far larger than Carlsbad's Big Room, then the record-holder.
Q 22Which Ardèche cave, found in 1994, is the subject of Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'?
Chauvet
Chauvet, found by Jean-Marie Chauvet and two companions in December 1994, is closed to the public; Herzog was allowed six four-hour shooting days by the culture ministry.
Q 23Cueva de las Manos, a UNESCO site of stencilled hands, is in which country?
Argentina
Troglobites are obligate cave-dwellers; species that merely visit, such as bats that feed outside, are trogloxenes, and those that can live in or out are troglophiles.
Q 14Which blind, pale cave salamander, nicknamed the 'human fish', can survive years without eating?
The olm
The olm (Proteus anguinus), once taken for a dragon's offspring when floods washed it out, averages about 68 years of life and can go a decade without food.
Q 15The Cave of Altamira, the first cave whose paintings were recognised as prehistoric, is in which country?
Spain
Altamira, in Cantabria, northern Spain, was recognised in 1879 by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who was accused of forgery; its Polychrome Ceiling bison now form Cantabria's tourism logo.
Q 16The word "karst", for landscapes of sinkholes and underground drainage, is associated with a plateau in which country?
Slovenia
The Kras (Karst) plateau of south-western Slovenia gave the landscape its name; Slovenia's Postojna Cave has run a tourist train since 1872, with 5 of its 24 kilometres open.
Q 17What are the mineral formations inside caves, from stalactites to flowstone, collectively called?
Speleothems
Speleothems (Greek for 'cave deposits') are almost all calcite or aragonite; their growth layers can be read like tree rings as records of past climate.
Q 18Lechuguilla Cave and Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico were carved from below by what, formed from gas rising off oil deposits?
Sulfuric acid
Sulfuric acid formed when hydrogen sulfide mixed with groundwater and ate upward; most caves are dissolved from above by rainwater.
Q 19Kazumura Cave on the slopes of Kīlauea in Hawaii is the world's longest and deepest example of what kind of cave?
Lava tube
Kazumura is a lava tube in the ʻAilāʻau flow that erupted around 500 years ago; it runs about 65 kilometres and drops 1,100 metres.
Q 20The Cave of the Crystals beneath the Naica mine in Mexico holds beams up to 11 metres long of which mineral?
Gypsum
The beams are selenite, a crystalline form of gypsum, grown over hundreds of thousands of years in mineral-rich water at a steady 58 °C; unprotected visitors can last only minutes.
Cueva de las Manos lies in Argentina's Santa Cruz province, in Patagonia; the artists sprayed pigment through bone pipes, and radiocarbon dates on those pipes helped date the work.
Q 24Krubera and Veryovkina, the first two caves explored below 2,000 metres, are in which mountain range?
Arabika Massif, Caucasus
Both lie in the Arabika Massif of the Western Caucasus, in Abkhazia; Krubera is also called Voronya, 'crows' cave', after the birds nesting in its entrance pit.
Q 25Rising Star Cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind yielded fossils of which hominin species, announced in 2015?
Homo naledi
Homo naledi, announced in September 2015, was recovered from the Dinaledi Chamber, reached through 'Superman's Crawl', passable only with one arm stretched ahead, and the 'Chute'.
Q 26Derinkuyu, an underground city carved into soft volcanic tuff and able to shelter 20,000 people, is in which region of Turkey?
Cappadocia
Derinkuyu lies in Cappadocia, in central Anatolia's Nevşehir province; its name means 'deep well', and the complex could be sealed from inside with rolling stone doors.
Q 27The Wookey Hole caves in Somerset are used by a local dairy to mature which food?
Cheddar cheese
The caves hold a steady 11 °C; the same show cave houses a human-shaped rock formation known as the Witch of Wookey.
Q 28Movile Cave in Romania, sealed off for 5.5 million years, hosts an ecosystem based entirely on what?
Chemosynthesis
Movile's food web rests on chemosynthesis: bacteria oxidising hydrogen sulfide and methane in air that is rich in sulfide and carbon dioxide but poor in oxygen.
Q 29The Jenolan Caves west of Sydney claim what world record?
Oldest known open cave system
Clay in Jenolan's caves was dated in 2006 to about 340 million years, making it the oldest known open cave system; the network follows the underground Jenolan River.
Q 30Cenotes, the water-filled sinkholes used by the Maya for water and sacrifice, are concentrated on which peninsula?
Yucatán
A dense ring of Yucatán cenotes traces the buried rim of the Chicxulub impact crater; the Maya used them for water supplies and occasionally for sacrificial offerings.