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60 free Charles Darwin trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Charles Darwin trivia quiz follows the man from a Shrewsbury childhood through medical school, Cambridge, five years aboard HMS Beagle and the long, nervous road to On the Origin of Species. The easy questions cover the landmarks: where he was born, the ship, the captain, the islands, the book and the abbey where he was buried. From there it digs into the fossils he dug up in Patagonia, the birds he mislabelled, the earthquake in Chile and the letter from Wallace that forced his hand. The harder questions are for readers of the biographies: the taxidermy teacher who was a freed slave, the Glutton Club, the exam placing, the eight years of barnacles, the spa town, the publisher, the size of the first print run, the orchid prediction that took forty years to confirm and the failed theory of heredity he called pangenesis. Every answer was checked against Darwin's encyclopaedia entry before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy it, our biology and famous scientists quizzes carry on from here.
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Q 01In which town was Darwin born in 1809?
Shrewsbury
The family home, The Mount, sat in Shropshire; his father Robert was a wealthy society doctor and financier.
Q 02Both of Darwin's grandfathers were prominent campaigners for what?
Abolition of slavery
The family's anti-slavery convictions stayed with Darwin, who argued bitterly about slavery with his captain in Brazil.
Q 03Darwin's grandfather Erasmus anticipated ideas of evolution and common descent in which 1794 work?
Zoonomia
It was a poetic fantasy of gradual creation whose undeveloped ideas his grandson would later expand.
Q 04Darwin first went to university to study medicine. Where?
Edinburgh
He found the lectures dull and surgery distressing, and neglected his studies for marine invertebrates.
Q 05As a medical student Darwin took taxidermy lessons from John Edmonstone, a freed slave from which region?
Demerara
Around 40 hour-long sessions with 'a very pleasant and intelligent man' reinforced Darwin's lifelong opposition to slavery.
Q 06In 1827 Darwin announced that black spores in oyster shells were actually the eggs of what?
A skate leech
It was his first scientific discovery, made while helping Robert Grant study marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth.
Q 07Darwin's father sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828 as the first step towards which career?
Country parson
He preferred riding, shooting and beetle collecting to study, but still came tenth in his final examination.
Q 08At Cambridge Darwin joined the 'Glutton Club'. What did its members do?
Ate exotic birds and beasts
The habit stuck: on the Beagle he ate puma, iguana, armadillo and giant tortoise.
Q 09On the Beagle voyage Darwin mistakenly ate which bird that he had intended to study?
A rhea
The remains were salvaged and the smaller species was later named Rhea darwinii in his honour.
Q 10Darwin's second cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to which hobby at Cambridge?
Beetle collecting
He pursued it zealously enough to get some of his finds published in Stephens' Illustrations of British Entomology.
Q 11At Cambridge, Darwin was known to the dons as 'the man who walks with' which botany professor?
John Stevens Henslow
It was this mentor who later proposed Darwin for the naturalist's place on HMS Beagle.
Q 12In his final Cambridge examination in January 1831, where did Darwin place among 178 candidates?
10th
He had crammed at the last minute and was delighted by the logic of William Paley's Evidences of Christianity.
Q 13Just before the Beagle voyage, Darwin spent a fortnight mapping strata in Wales with which geologist?
Adam Sedgwick
Sedgwick later predicted Darwin 'will have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe', then rejected his theory of evolution.
Q 21Darwin explained coral atolls as reefs that kept growing while the islands they ringed were doing what?
Sinking
The theory became his first scientific book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, in 1842.
Q 22Which Galapagos animals with island-varying shells did Darwin fail to collect properly?
Tortoises
The crew took some aboard as food and ate them, shells and all.
Q 23Seeing the platypus and the rat-kangaroo in Australia, Darwin mused that it was almost as though what?
Two Creators had been at work
He found the Aboriginal Australians 'good-humoured & pleasant' and noted how European settlement had depleted them.
Q 14Who was the captain of HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage?
Robert FitzRoy
He wanted a gentleman companion rather than 'a mere collector', and later founded what became the Met Office.
Q 15Who persuaded Darwin's reluctant father to let him join the Beagle, and to pay for it?
His uncle Josiah Wedgwood
Robert Darwin thought the planned two-year trip a waste of time; it ended up lasting almost five years.
Q 16The Beagle voyage that began in December 1831 lasted almost how many years?
Five
Darwin spent most of that time ashore, collecting and geologising, while the ship charted the coasts.
Q 17Which book did FitzRoy give Darwin, on land slowly rising and falling over immense time?
Principles of Geology
Its author, Charles Lyell, became one of Darwin's closest allies and later arranged for the Origin to be published.
Q 18Darwin identified the giant Megatherium, found in Patagonia, as an extinct kind of what?
Ground sloth
The bony armour plates he found nearby turned out to belong to Glyptodon, a huge armadillo-like animal.
Q 19Which anatomist described the fossil bones Darwin brought back from South America?
Richard Owen
He later turned into one of Darwin's fiercest critics and was discredited in the 'Great Hippocampus Question'.
Q 20What natural disaster did Darwin experience in Chile in 1835?
An earthquake
He saw mussel beds stranded above the high-tide line, evidence the land had just been lifted.
Q 24At which Cornish port did the Beagle finally anchor on 2 October 1836?
Falmouth
Darwin went straight home to Shrewsbury and then to Cambridge to find experts for his collections.
Q 25Which ornithologist announced Darwin's Galapagos birds were twelve species of finch?
John Gould
Darwin had taken them for a mix of blackbirds, 'gros-beaks' and finches and had not even labelled them by island.
Q 26Whose Essay on the Principle of Population inspired Darwin's 'struggle for existence' in 1838?
Thomas Malthus
He said it 'at once struck' him that favourable variations would be preserved and unfavourable ones destroyed.
Q 27In his 1838 'Marry / Not Marry' note, Darwin wrote that a wife would be 'better than a' what?
Dog
On the other side of the ledger he listed 'less money for books' and 'terrible loss of time'.
Q 28Darwin married his first cousin Emma in 1839. What was her maiden name?
Wedgwood
The pottery family and the Darwins had intermarried for generations, which later made him fret about inbreeding in his children.
Q 29What did the Darwins nickname their first London home in Gower Street, because of its gaudy interiors?
Macaw Cottage
He moved his 'museum' of specimens in over Christmas 1838, days after being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Q 30Down House, where Darwin lived from 1842 until his death, is in which county?
Kent
The family left London to escape its pressures; he did most of his experiments in the garden and greenhouse there.