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50 free Hard Bear trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This hard bear trivia quiz goes well past 'which bear is biggest'. It asks who first described the polar bear as its own species and when, how many chromosomes a giant panda has compared with a brown bear, which single-letter gene change makes a spirit bear white, what the largest polar bear on record weighed, and how a Taiwanese zoo once passed off a painted sun bear as a panda. It also covers the extinct giants (cave bears and the short-faced bears of the Americas), the evolutionary link between bears and seals, and the human side of bear history: berserkers, bear-baiting under Elizabeth I, the Polish army's Corporal Wojtek and the real cub behind Smokey Bear. Expect scientific names, dates, numbers and etymology. A wildlife biologist or a serious nature-documentary fan should score well; a casual player will learn a lot. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and zoological references, and each question shows the sentence it rests on. All 50 questions are free with no sign-up. For an easier round, try our main Bears trivia page or Bear Trivia for Kids.
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Q 01Which naturalist formally described the polar bear as a distinct species, Ursus maritimus, in 1774?
Constantine John Phipps
He had sailed towards the North Pole the year before. Linnaeus had lumped it in with the brown bear in 1758 as a 'mostly-white sea bear'.
Q 02The record polar bear, shot at Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, in 1960, weighed roughly how much?
1,002 kg
That is roughly the weight of a small car. Typical adult males run 300 to 800 kg and can add 50 percent to their mass in fat before winter.
Q 03Polar bears descended from brown bears that were isolated by glaciation roughly how long ago?
400,000 years
That makes it the youngest bear species. Wild grizzly-polar hybrids were confirmed by DNA in the Canadian Arctic in 2006, all traced to a single female polar bear.
Q 04A study found polar bears could swim for an average of 3.4 days at a time, covering roughly what distance?
154 km
They paddle with the broad front paws and steer with the hind legs, at up to about 6 km/h. Their eyes sit high on the head so they can stay above the surface.
Q 05Why do a polar bear's guard hairs help it float and stay warm?
They are hollow
The hairs are transparent, not white; the coat looks white because it scatters light and has no pigment. Underneath, the skin is black.
Q 06Which pinniped species makes up most of the polar bear's diet?
Ringed
Bears wait at breathing holes and eat mainly the blubber. Bearded and harp seals are taken too, and adult males occasionally hunt young walruses.
Q 07The six ursine bears each have 74 chromosomes. How many does the giant panda have?
42
The spectacled bear has 52. Chromosome fusions explain the lower counts, and banding patterns helped confirm the panda is a bear rather than a raccoon relative.
Q 08What does the giant panda's binomial name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, literally mean?
Black-and-white cat-foot
Its Chinese names have included 'spotted bear' and 'bamboo bear'. The Taiwanese name reverses the characters to 'big bear-cat'.
Q 09The panda's famous 'thumb' is actually what kind of bone?
A modified sesamoid
The panda's true first digit is not opposable and lines up with the other fingers, so a wrist bone was co-opted to grip bamboo stalks.
Q 10In 1988, a private zoo in which city passed off a painted sun bear as a giant panda?
Tainan
The incident is credited with popularising the Taiwanese name for the panda, 'big bear-cat'. Real pandas were then extremely rare outside China.
Q 11China's Fourth National Survey (2015) estimated how many wild giant pandas over 1.5 years old?
1,864
Adding an estimated 9.6 percent cubs gave roughly 2,060 animals. The IUCN downgraded the panda from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2016.
Q 12Roughly how much bamboo does an average giant panda eat per day?
9 to 14 kg
Bamboo is so poor in energy that pandas must feed frequently and can be active at any hour, and they need at least two bamboo species in range in case one flowers and dies off.
Q 13Which group of animals is generally considered the closest living relatives of bears?
Pinnipeds (seals and walruses)
Q 21A single nucleotide change in which gene makes the white 'spirit bear' variant of the Kermode bear?
MC1R
The mutation is recessive, so two black parents can produce a white cub if both carry it. White Kermodes are not albinos: their skin and eyes are pigmented.
Q 22Roughly how many fully white Kermode bears are thought to exist?
100 to 500
They are commonest on Gribbell, Princess Royal and Roderick islands, where they make up 10 to 20 percent of the local Kermode population.
Q 23American black bears learned colour-discrimination tasks faster than which primate?
Chimpanzees
They learned as fast as domestic dogs. Black bears also have the shortest claws of any bear, which makes them the best climbers among the large species.
Both morphology and molecular data support the link, and the extinct otter-like amphicynodontines are treated as stem-pinnipeds close to early bears.
Q 14Bears are unique among carnivorans in lacking which feature?
Touch-sensitive whiskers on the muzzle
They make up for it with what may be the best nose of any mammal, able to locate a carcass several kilometres away.
Q 15Which recently extinct North African population of Ursus arctos was hunted out in the 19th century?
Atlas
Brown bears entered Europe about 250,000 years ago and North Africa soon after. The Californian and Mexican grizzlies were also hunted to extinction.
Q 16Which naturalist classified the grizzly as Ursus horribilis in 1815?
George Ord
Lewis and Clark spelled it 'grisley', which could mean grizzled (grey-tipped) or grisly (fear-inspiring). The Latin name went with the second reading.
Q 17What is the fastest running speed reliably recorded for a grizzly bear at Yellowstone?
48 km/h
The often-quoted 56 km/h figure is anecdotal. Grizzly front claws run 5 to 10 cm long, roughly double a black bear's.
Q 18Roughly how many grizzlies live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana?
About 1,000
Another thousand or so live in the Northern Continental Divide of Montana.
Q 19Kodiak bears have been genetically isolated on their archipelago since roughly when?
The last ice age, 10,000–12,000 years ago
They are a textbook case of island gigantism: mature males average around 500 kg and can hit 680 kg at their autumn peak.
Q 20Roughly how many brown bears live on Japan's Hokkaido island?
2,000–3,000
The species is still Least Concern globally, but the Marsican brown bear of central Italy is thought to number only about 50 animals.
Q 24Per biologist Stephen Herrero, in what share of fatal black bear attacks did the bear act as a predator?
88 percent
That is the opposite of grizzly attacks, which are mostly defensive surprises. Herrero found bears killed about three people a year in the US and Canada in the 1990s, versus 30 to 50 by dogs.
Q 25Hibernating bears avoid muscle wasting and can go months without urinating because they do what?
Recycle their proteins and urine
For decades bears were not counted as 'true' hibernators because their body temperature barely drops; the definition was rewritten around metabolic suppression instead.
Q 26Which Oligocene genus, around 30 to 28 million years ago, is considered ancestral to all living bears?
Ursavus
It arose from a Cephalogale-like ancestor and spread through Asia. Living bear lineages split from it between 15 and 20 million years ago.
Q 27Which fossil European bear of 3-4 million years ago was nearly identical to today's Asian black bear?
Ursus minimus
Two lineages evolved from it: the black bears (sun, Asian black and American black) and the brown bears, which include the polar bear.
Q 28The cave bear, Ursus spelaeus, went extinct roughly how long ago?
24,000 years
Unlike brown bears they were probably almost entirely herbivorous. Chauvet Cave in France holds about 300 'bear hollows' left by hibernating cave bears.
Q 29Which two extinct giant short-faced bears may have been the largest carnivorans ever in the Americas?
Arctodus simus and Arctotherium angustidens
The spectacled bear is the only surviving member of their subfamily. Arctotherium reached South America after the Isthmus of Panama formed.
Q 30The original 1791 scientific name for the sloth bear placed it in which genus, reflecting a famous mix-up?
Bradypus (the sloths)
Its shaggy coat, long claws and habit of hanging from branches fooled early naturalists. It is now the only species in Melursus.