Evolution Trivia
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203 free Evolution trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Evolution trivia is bigger than Darwin. It covers what evolution actually is (a change in heritable traits across generations), the four processes that drive it (natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow), the four modes of speciation, the difference between an adaptation and an exaptation, why whales still have hip bones and chickens can be coaxed into growing teeth, and how a last universal common ancestor from roughly 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago turned into five billion species, more than 99 percent of them now extinct. This quiz also follows the history of the idea: Anaximander and Lucretius, Ibn Khaldun, Linnaeus and Lamarck, Malthus and the struggle for existence, Darwin and Wallace, Marsh's toothed birds and fossil horses, Mendel and Weismann, the modern synthesis, Watson, Crick and Franklin, Dobzhansky's 'nothing in biology makes sense' line, evo-devo, and the American courtroom battles from Scopes to Kitzmiller v. Dover. It also touches applications, from directed evolution and blind cavefish to genetic algorithms. Easy questions suit anyone who took school biology; the expert tier is for people who know which grass speciates around metal mines. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on evolution, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 203 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In biology, evolution is defined as the change in what over successive generations?
Heritable characteristics of populations
Heritable characteristics of populations are what shift: no single organism evolves during its lifetime, but the mix of inherited traits across a population changes as the generations pass.
Q 02Which two British naturalists independently conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection?
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: their papers were read together at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, after Wallace mailed Darwin an essay that matched his own unpublished theory.
Q 03Which phrase coined by Herbert Spencer did Darwin adopt in later editions of On the Origin of Species?
Survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest was Spencer's phrase of 1864; Wallace urged Darwin to borrow it because 'natural selection' made nature sound like a conscious chooser.
Q 04What is the ultimate source of all genetic variation in organisms?
Mutation
Mutation, a change in the DNA sequence, supplies the raw material: selection, gene flow and drift can only spread, shuffle or remove variants that a mutation has already produced.
Q 05What is the chance fluctuation of allele frequencies from one generation to the next called?
Genetic drift
Genetic drift is change by luck of the draw: which individuals happen to breed shifts allele frequencies, and in a small population a variant can vanish or take over within a few generations, helpful or not.
Q 06The neutral theory holds that most evolutionary change at the molecular level results from what?
Random drift fixing harmless mutations
Random drift fixing harmless mutations: because such neutral changes pile up at a fairly steady rate, the theory gave biologists a rationale for the molecular clock used to date when lineages split.
Q 07How is an organism's evolutionary fitness measured?
By its ability to survive and reproduce
By its ability to survive and reproduce, counted in genes passed to the next generation: the winner is not necessarily the strongest, fastest or biggest animal, just the one leaving most descendants.
Q 08What is a 'throwback' trait like hind legs in dolphins, from reactivated dormant genes, called?
An atavism
An atavism is an ancestral trait that resurfaces: in 2006 Japanese fishermen caught a bottlenose dolphin with an extra pair of fins near its tail, thought to be remains of its land-living ancestors' hind legs.
Q 09Which term describes natural selection that favours both extremes of a trait over the average?
Disruptive
Disruptive selection favours both extremes: among Africa's black-bellied seedcrackers, small-billed birds specialise on soft sedge seeds and large-billed birds on hard ones, so in-between bills lose out.
Q 10Cumbersome antlers, mating calls and bright male colours are products of which evolutionary process?
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, Darwin's term for competition over mates, produces costly ornaments like antlers and bright plumage because they raise mating success even at a cost to survival.
Q 11In a famous long-term laboratory experiment, E. coli evolved the ability to use what as a nutrient?
Citric acid
Citric acid: after tens of thousands of generations, one of the twelve E. coli lines Richard Lenski started in 1988 began feeding on the citrate in its broth, which the species normally cannot use when oxygen is present.
Q 12Why do a bat's wing, a mouse's foot and a human hand share the same bones?
Descent from a common mammalian ancestor
Descent from a common mammalian ancestor: evolution reworks inherited parts instead of starting afresh, so one set of bones was stretched into a bat's wing and shortened into a grasping hand.
Q 13Which of these human body parts is considered a vestigial structure?
Q 21The plant Arabidopsis suecica arose as a new species through which process, common in plants but rare in animals?
Hybridisation with chromosome doubling
Hybridisation with chromosome doubling made Arabidopsis suecica: a cross of thale cress with a relative kept both parents' full chromosome sets, leaving it fertile by itself but unable to breed with either parent.
Q 22Which theory explains the fossil pattern of short bursts of evolution between long periods of stasis?
Punctuated equilibrium
Punctuated equilibrium, proposed in 1972, holds that species stay stable for long spans and change rapidly at speciation in small isolated populations that rarely fossilise; it contrasts with phyletic gradualism.
Q 23Which mass extinction event was the largest in Earth's history, killing most marine species?
The coccyx
The coccyx, or tailbone, is what is left of the tail our ancestors lost; every human embryo still grows a small tail for a few weeks before it shrinks away.
Q 14What is the term for a structure that evolved for one function but became useful for another?
An exaptation
An exaptation is a trait co-opted for a new job: feathers probably first evolved to keep their owners warm, and only later were pressed into service for flight.
Q 15Bones that form the jaw in other animals develop into which structure in mammals?
Part of the middle ear
Part of the middle ear: the two bones that hinged the jaw of early reptile-like ancestors shrank into the malleus and incus, so mammals hear with bones their forebears chewed with.
Q 16A mutation in chickens can make embryos grow which features, lost by birds tens of millions of years ago?
Teeth
Teeth: chicken embryos with the talpid2 mutation sprout cone-shaped teeth like an alligator's, showing that birds, toothless for at least 70 million years, still carry the genetic recipe.
Q 17Which evolutionary biologist defined the Biological Species Concept in 1942?
Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr came to the question as a bird man: he had spent over two years collecting thousands of bird skins in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands before arguing that who can mate with whom, not looks, marks out a species.
Q 18Which mode of speciation, the commonest in animals, occurs when populations are geographically separated?
Allopatric
Allopatric speciation begins when a river changes course or a mountain range rises and splits a population; cut off, the two groups change independently until they can no longer interbreed.
Q 19Which effect, a loss of genetic variety when a few individuals start a new colony, drives peripatric speciation?
The founder effect
The founder effect: a handful of colonists carry only a sample of the parent population's genes, so the colony starts out different and, being small, shifts further by chance with each generation.
Q 20The grass Anthoxanthum odoratum undergoes parapatric speciation in response to what?
Metal pollution from mines
Metal pollution from mines: sweet vernal grass on old mine spoil evolved heavy-metal tolerance and a shifted flowering time, reducing interbreeding with neighbouring non-tolerant plants, a textbook case of incipient parapatric speciation.
The Permian–Triassic
The Permian–Triassic extinction, about 252 million years ago, came closer than any other to ending animal life; the prime suspect is a vast outpouring of magma in Siberia known as the Siberian Traps.
Q 24Roughly what proportion of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct?
More than 99%
More than 99% of all species are gone because extinction is the normal fate of a species: a typical one lasts less than ten million years before it dies out.
Q 25What does the acronym LUCA stand for?
Last universal common ancestor
Last universal common ancestor: LUCA was not the first living thing, only the most recent one from which everything alive today descends; a 2016 study traced 355 of its gene families.
Q 26How old is the Earth?
About 4.54 billion years
About 4.54 billion years: the figure comes from meteorites, because plate tectonics has recycled Earth's own first rocks; the benchmark is lead from an iron meteorite that fell at Canyon Diablo, Arizona.
Q 27Where were microbial mat fossils found in 3.48-billion-year-old sandstone?
Western Australia
Western Australia: 3.48-billion-year-old rocks of the Pilbara's Dresser Formation carry cracks, tufts and gas domes identical to those microbial mats leave on shorelines today, which is how they were read as life.
Q 28Which ape is, together with the chimpanzee, the closest living relative of humans?
The bonobo
The bonobo and the chimpanzee are equally our closest kin. The Congo River keeps the two apart, bonobos to its south and chimpanzees to its north, because neither ape swims well.
Q 29What do eukaryotic cells, such as those of animals and plants, have that bacteria lack?
A nucleus
A nucleus: eukaryotes wall their DNA inside one, while bacteria leave theirs loose in the cell. Our own red blood cells are the odd ones out: they push the nucleus out as they mature, which leaves more room for haemoglobin.
Q 30In which event do most major animal groups first appear in the fossil record?
The Cambrian explosion
The Cambrian explosion put most major animal groups into the rocks in a geologically short span; it was long thought to mark the very first animals, until older fossils turned up in the Ediacaran rocks beneath.