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50 free Jane Goodall trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream in July 1960 with no degree, a notebook and her mother, and spent the next six decades rewriting what we thought we knew about chimpanzees: that they make tools, hunt meat, wage war and have personalities worth naming. This quiz covers her whole life, from the toy chimpanzee her father gave her as a girl to the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025. Easy questions ask which animal she studied, where Gombe is and who Louis Leakey was. Harder ones dig into the chimp who first trusted her, the Cambridge rule she was only the eighth person to bend, the youth programme born on her back porch in Dar es Salaam, the Far Side cartoon that her institute called an atrocity, the Stevie Nicks song written about her, and the two Simpsons episodes she is connected to. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Jane Goodall, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for science teachers, conservationists and quiz hosts who want more than "she liked chimps". Related quizzes: our Animals, Nature and Famous Scientists pages.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal did Jane Goodall spend more than six decades studying in the wild?
Chimpanzees
She was described by many publications as the world's preeminent expert on the species.
Q 02In which country is Gombe Stream National Park, the site of Goodall's research?
Tanzania
It was still Tanganyika when she first arrived, and its national parks were later run by her second husband.
Q 03Which palaeontologist mentored Goodall and sent her to Gombe in 1960?
Louis Leakey
He believed studying living great apes would hint at how early hominids behaved, and secretly wanted a chimpanzee researcher.
Q 04What job did Leakey first offer Goodall when she telephoned him in Kenya in 1957?
Secretary
He kept his real plan, finding a chimpanzee researcher, to himself and sent her to Olduvai Gorge instead.
Q 05Which stuffed toy did Goodall's father give her as a child instead of a teddy bear?
A toy chimpanzee named Jubilee
Her mother's friends thought it would give her nightmares; it was still on her dresser in 2000.
Q 06In which London district was Goodall born in April 1934?
Hampstead
Her mother Vanne was a novelist from Milford Haven; the family later moved to Bournemouth.
Q 07Who accompanied Goodall to Gombe in 1960 to satisfy the chief warden's safety concerns?
Her mother
Goodall credited her mother with encouraging her to enter primatology, then a male-dominated field.
Q 08From which university did Goodall receive her PhD in ethology in 1965?
Cambridge
She was only the eighth person allowed to study for a doctorate there without first taking a bachelor's degree.
Q 09Who supervised Goodall's doctoral thesis on the behaviour of free-living chimps?
Robert Hinde
She studied at Newnham College and finished the thesis in 1966, covering her first five years at Gombe.
Q 10What did Goodall see a chimpanzee doing with grass stalks at a termite mound, proving humans aren't the only tool users?
Fishing for termites
The chimps also stripped leaves off twigs to make them work better, the rudimentary beginnings of toolmaking.
Q 11How did her mentor react to Goodall's termite-fishing discovery?
"We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!"
Humans had long set themselves apart from other animals as "Man the Toolmaker".
Q 12Which primate did Goodall watch the Gombe chimps hunt and eat, disproving their vegetarian image?
Colobus monkeys
The Gombe chimps kill and eat as much as a third of that species' population in the park each year.
Q 13What was the name of the grey-chinned male chimpanzee who was the first to warm up to Goodall?
David Greybeard
Q 21In which country did Goodall found the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre in 1992?
Republic of Congo
It cares for chimps orphaned by the bush-meat trade and houses over a hundred of them across three islands.
Q 22What does the acronym TACARE, Goodall's 1994 reforestation project, deliberately sound like?
Take Care
It reforests hills around Gombe while teaching neighbouring communities about sustainability and offering scholarships to girls.
Q 23To which institution were the Jane Goodall archives moved from Minnesota in 2011?
Duke University
A carving of him sits beside her plaque on the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
Q 14What was unconventional about how Goodall identified the animals she studied?
She gave them names instead of numbers
Numbering was thought essential for avoiding emotional attachment; she was accused of the sin of anthropomorphism.
Q 15Which cunning chimpanzee displaced Goliath as Gombe's alpha male?
Mike
He is remembered for improvisation, famously making a racket with empty kerosene cans during his displays.
Q 16Flo, the motherly high-ranking female, had children whose names all began with which letter?
F
Figan, Faben, Freud, Fifi and Flint; Fifi's son Frodo later attacked humans, including Goodall herself.
Q 17What was the title of Goodall's first book-length study, published in 1971?
In the Shadow of Man
It appeared the same year as Innocent Killers, co-written with her photographer husband Hugo van Lawick.
Q 18Which magazine published a series of Goodall's articles about her research in the 1960s?
National Geographic
The same society later awarded her its Hubbard Medal and produced the 1965 film Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees.
Q 19In which year did Goodall found the Jane Goodall Institute?
1977
It now has nineteen offices around the world and is known for community-centred conservation in Africa.
Q 20What youth programme did Goodall begin in 1991 with a dozen teenagers in Dar es Salaam?
Roots & Shoots
By 2010 it had grown to more than 10,000 groups in over 100 countries.
Anne Pusey, who had managed the archive in Minnesota and worked with Goodall in Tanzania, took charge of the collection there.
Q 24Roughly how many days a year was Goodall said to be travelling for advocacy work as of 2004?
Nearly 300
She had shifted from observation to activism after a 1986 conference on understanding chimps in Chicago.
Q 25What role did Kofi Annan give Goodall at the United Nations in April 2002?
Messenger of Peace
The same year she published The Ten Trusts with Marc Bekoff, with whom she had founded Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Q 26In which year was Goodall promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire?
2003
She had been made a CBE in 1995 "for services to zoology"; the investiture at Buckingham Palace came in 2004.
Q 27Which US president awarded Goodall the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 2025?
Joe Biden
It joined a shelf that already held the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize and the French Legion of Honour.
Q 28What was the profession of Goodall's first husband, Baron Hugo van Lawick?
Wildlife photographer
They married in 1964 at Chelsea Old Church and she was known as Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall until their 1974 divorce.
Q 29What was the nickname of Goodall's son Hugo, born in 1967?
Grub
She wrote a 1972 children's book, Grub: The Bush Baby, with his father.
Q 30What position did Goodall's second husband, Derek Bryceson, hold that helped protect her research?
Director of Tanzania's national parks
He was able to impose an embargo on tourism at Gombe; he died of cancer in October 1980.