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60 free Cloning trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This cloning trivia quiz covers the science, the animals and the arguments. The easy end is Dolly: the breed, the lab, the body part her cell came from and the country singer she was named after. From there it moves through the technique itself, somatic cell nuclear transfer, why clones are never quite perfect copies, why a cloned calico cat came out a different colour, and how many eggs it took to make one lamb. The middle of the quiz is a parade of firsts: the 1952 frogs, the Chinese carp of 1963, the first cloned mule and horse in 2003, CopyCat, Snuppy the Afghan hound, the black-footed ferret cloned from a female dead for 30 years, the Przewalski's horse from 1980 tissue, and Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, the macaques who finally proved primates could be cloned the Dolly way. It also visits the darker corners: the South Korean scientist whose human-cloning papers were faked, the UFO religion that announced a baby clone called Eve, and the ibex that became the only species to go extinct twice. It closes with cloning in fiction, from Brave New World to The Boys from Brazil. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on cloning, Dolly and the individual animals and people involved, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty-four questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Dolly the sheep was the first mammal cloned from what?
An adult body cell
Earlier clones had come from embryonic cells; Dolly proved a mature, specialised cell could grow a whole new animal.
Q 02From which part of the donor sheep's body was Dolly's cell taken?
The udder
The mammary-gland origin explains the name; the donor ewe was six years old.
Q 03The first mammal cloned from an adult cell was named after which performer?
Dolly Parton
The team leader said they could not think of a more impressive pair of glands than Parton's.
Q 04Where was Dolly cloned?
Roslin Institute
The institute is part of the University of Edinburgh; PPL Therapeutics and the Ministry of Agriculture paid for the work.
Q 05In which country was Dolly born?
Scotland
She lived her whole life at the institute in Midlothian, where she was bred with a Welsh Mountain ram.
Q 06What breed of sheep was Dolly?
Finn-Dorset
The breed usually lives 11 to 12 years; Dolly was put down at six and a half.
Q 07In which year was Dolly born?
1996
Her birth on 5 July was kept quiet until 22 February 1997, when the announcement made headlines worldwide.
Q 08Who led the team that cloned Dolly?
Ian Wilmut
He was knighted in 2008; his colleague Keith Campbell shared the credit and the 2008 Shaw Prize with him.
Q 09How many eggs were used in the experiment that produced Dolly?
277
They yielded 29 viable embryos and a handful of lambs at birth, only one of which survived.
Q 10How many mothers did Dolly have?
Three
One ewe gave the egg, another the DNA, and a third carried the embryo to term.
Q 11How many lambs did Dolly produce in her lifetime?
Six
Bonnie came first in 1998, then twins Sally and Rosie, then triplets Lucy, Darcy and Cotton in 2000.
Q 12What condition led to Dolly being euthanised in 2003?
A progressive lung disease
It was a form of lung cancer caused by a retrovirus and common in sheep kept indoors; other flock members died of it as well.
Q 13Which finding fuelled speculation that Dolly had been born genetically 'old'?
Her short telomeres
The institute said intensive health screening found no abnormalities linked to advanced ageing.
Q 21Identical twins are a natural example of cloning. How do they form?
A fertilised egg splits
Artificial embryo splitting copies the effect and is best done at the six- to eight-cell stage.
Q 22Which German embryologist and his student performed the first nuclear transfer in 1924?
Hans Spemann
He and Hilde Mangold used amphibian embryos; Spemann won the 1935 Nobel Prize for discovering embryonic induction.
Q 23Robert Briggs and Thomas King cloned which animal in 1952?
Northern leopard frog
From 104 nuclear transfers they got 35 complete embryos and 27 tadpoles.
Q 14Where is Dolly's preserved body displayed?
National Museum of Scotland
It has been on regular exhibition in Edinburgh since 2003.
Q 15What does the abbreviation SCNT stand for?
Somatic cell nuclear transfer
The nucleus of a body cell goes into an egg that has had its own nucleus removed, then an electric pulse starts division.
Q 16Why are SCNT clones like Dolly not perfect genetic copies of the nucleus donor?
The egg keeps its own mitochondrial DNA
The donor cell's mitochondria are left behind, so the clone inherits the egg donor's mitochondrial genome.
Q 17Who coined the term 'clone' in 1903?
Herbert J. Webber
Horticulturists spelled it 'clon' until the early 20th century, when the final e was added to mark the long o.
Q 18The word clone derives from the Ancient Greek word for what?
Twig
It refers to growing a new plant from a cutting, the oldest form of deliberate cloning.
Q 19What is parthenogenesis?
Reproduction by a female without a mate
It occurs naturally in some insects, hammerhead sharks, Cape honeybees and certain lizards.
Q 20Which large lizard is among the animals known to reproduce by parthenogenesis?
Komodo dragon
In species with XY sex determination the offspring of such virgin births are always female.
Q 24Who cloned a frog from tadpole body cells in 1958 and shared a 2012 Nobel Prize?
John Gurdon
He shared the prize with Shinya Yamanaka for showing that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.
Q 25The world's first cloned fish, a carp, was produced in 1963 in which country?
China
Embryologist Tong Dizhou inserted DNA from a male carp's cell into a female carp's egg.
Q 26Who produced the first cloned mammal, from early embryonic cells, in 1984?
Steen Willadsen
It was a sheep; Wilmut's Scottish institute followed with Megan and Morag from differentiated embryonic cells in 1995.
Q 27What was the name of the first cloned cat, born in December 2001?
CC
The name stands for CopyCat or Carbon Copy; she was cloned at Texas A&M and lived to 18.
Q 28Why did the cloned cat CC look different from her calico genetic donor?
X-inactivation and epigenetic reprogramming
Coat patterning in calicos depends on which X chromosome is switched off in each cell, which is not copied by cloning.
Q 29Snuppy, the first cloned dog, was which breed?
Afghan Hound
He was made from an ear cell, carried by a Labrador surrogate, and named for Seoul National University plus 'puppy'.
Q 30How many surrogate mothers were used in the project that produced Snuppy?
123
Only two produced pups and one died of pneumonia within a month, a success rate below two tenths of a percent.