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50 free Fossils trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
A fossil is any preserved remains, impression or trace of a once-living thing from a past geological age, from micrometre-wide bacteria to an 88-metre petrified sequoia. The word comes from the Latin for obtained by digging, and the oldest known fossils are around 3.5 billion years old. This quiz covers how fossils form, from permineralization and pyritization to casts, molds and amber, the difference between body and trace fossils, index fossils and biostratigraphy, radiometric dating, the ancient myths fossils inspired, Steno, Hooke, William Smith, Cuvier and Mary Anning, and oddities like coprolites, Lagerstätten and pseudofossils. About a third of the questions are classroom-easy, a third are medium and the rest are for rockhounds. Every answer is checked against reference paleontology pages.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word fossil comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Obtained by digging
Classical Latin fossilis; the totality of fossils is called the fossil record.
Q 02What is the scientific study of fossils called?
Paleontology
It covers their age, how they formed and what they mean for evolution.
Q 03Specimens are sometimes only counted as fossils once they are older than roughly what age?
10,000 years
Younger Holocene remains that are still too old to be modern are called subfossils.
Q 04About how old are the oldest known fossils?
3.5 to 4.1 billion years
The very oldest are chemical traces; the oldest stromatolites are over 3.4 billion years old.
Q 05Which technique, developed in the early 20th century, gives rocks an absolute age?
Radiometric dating
Before it, superposition and biostratigraphy gave only relative ages.
Q 06What is the largest known fossil, an 88-metre specimen found at Coaldale, Nevada?
A sequoia tree
Fossils range from one-micrometre bacteria up to trees many metres long.
Q 07What is the technical name for fossilized feces?
Coprolites
They count as trace fossils because they show behaviour rather than body shape.
Q 08Tracks, burrows and droppings are classed as what kind of fossil?
Trace fossils
Their other name is ichnofossils.
Q 09Which mythical creature may have been inspired by Protoceratops skulls, according to Adrienne Mayor?
The griffin
Paleontologists such as Mark Witton have contested the idea.
Q 10What were the tongue stones, or glossopetra, described by Pliny the Elder?
Fossil shark teeth
Nicholas Steno made the connection to sharks in 1666.
Q 11Pliny's horns of Ammon were the fossils of which group, and gave it its modern name?
Ammonites
They are shelled cousins of the octopus.
Q 12Toadstones, once thought to cure poison, were really the teeth of what?
A Cretaceous ray-finned fish
The fish was Lepidotes; the belief lasted until the 18th century.
Q 13In Japan, the same fossil teeth were taken to be the claws of which mythical creature?
Tengu
The association is documented from some time after the 8th century.
Q 14In medieval China, fossil mammal remains were sold as medicine under what name?
Q 21Which British collector found the first complete ichthyosaur and a complete plesiosaur?
Mary Anning
Her finds on the Dorset coast sparked public and scholarly interest in the early 1800s.
Q 22When Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the oldest known animal fossils dated to which period?
Cambrian
He worried about the missing older record and hoped such fossils would turn up; they did.
Q 23The Ediacara biota, dated to about 575 million years ago, were early examples of what?
Multicellular eukaryotes
They are also called the Vendian biota.
Dragon bones
Mid-Cretaceous dinosaur bones were still being eaten in Ruyang County in the early 21st century.
Q 15Which Song dynasty scholar argued in 1088 that mountain seashells proved a shoreline had shifted?
Shen Kuo
His Dream Pool Essays also read petrified bamboo as evidence of gradual climate change.
Q 16Skulls of which extinct animal may have inspired the one-eyed Cyclopes of Greek myth?
Deinotherium
The big central hole is actually the opening for the trunk.
Q 17Fossil sea-urchin shells associated with Thor were kept in Norse houses as what?
Thunderstones
In England they became shepherd's crowns and, in Suffolk, bakers' fairy loaves.
Q 18Who in 1666 dissected a shark and linked its teeth to the tongue stones of legend?
Nicholas Steno
He concluded they were teeth of a long-extinct shark, not serpents' tongues.
Q 19Which English canal engineer formulated the principle of faunal succession?
William Smith
Darwin used the principle as one of his chief pieces of evidence for evolution.
Q 20Which French naturalist concluded most fossils were extinct species and championed catastrophism?
Georges Cuvier
His 1796 elephant paper spoke of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.
Q 24Who first described fossil droppings scientifically, in 1829?
William Buckland
Before that they were called fossil fir cones or bezoar stones.
Q 25Dating rocks by the fossils embedded in them is called what?
Biostratigraphy
For geology's first 150 years it and superposition were the only ways to tell relative age.
Q 26Which paleontologists published the seminal paper on punctuated equilibrium in 1971?
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge
Eldredge's study of Phacops trilobite eye lenses helped prompt it.
Q 27Absolute dating of fossil-bearing rock usually relies on which kind of layer?
Volcanic ash
Radioactive elements are common only in rocks of volcanic origin.
Q 28Species known from fossils amount to less than what share of known living species?
5%
That implies far less than 1% of all species that ever lived are known from fossils.
Q 29Fossil sites with exceptional preservation are known by what German term?
Lagerstätten
Examples include the Burgess Shale and the Solnhofen Limestone.
Q 30Which famous Lagerstätte is in the Canadian Rockies?
Burgess Shale
Maotianshan is in China, Hunsrück in Germany and Mazon Creek in Illinois.