Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Poop trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free poop trivia questions with answers. Everyone poops, and almost nobody knows much about it. This quiz fixes that with questions on the science of human waste, from the seven types on the Bristol stool scale and what makes it brown to the bacteria that make up half of it, and on the animal kingdom's stranger habits: the wombat's cubes, the sloth's weekly climb, the dung beetle that steers by the Milky Way, the civet whose droppings sell for $1,300 a kilo. History gets its share too: the Guano Islands Act and Peru's bird-dropping boom, Tudor gong farmers hauling night soil, Mary Anning and the first coprolites, the Viking stool insured by a York museum, and the American who sold the first toilet paper. It suits kids' science nights, pub quizzes with a sense of humour and anyone who has ever read on the toilet. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on faeces, guano, coprolites, the animals and the history involved, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly what proportion of fresh human faeces is water?
About 75%
Of the solid part, up to half can be bacterial biomass.
Q 02Up to what share of the solid matter in faeces is bacterial biomass?
25 to 54%
The rest is undigested plant matter, protein, fat and salts.
Q 03What gives faeces its usual brown colour?
Bile pigments from the liver
Green stool can mean bile passed through too fast to be processed.
Q 04What is the medical chart that sorts stools into seven types called?
The Bristol stool scale
It was developed at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and published in 1997.
Q 05On the Bristol scale, which numbers indicate constipation?
1 and 2
Type 4, the smooth sausage, is considered ideal; some media call it the ghost poop.
Q 06Which Bristol number has been dubbed the 'perfect poop' by some media?
4
Types 3 and 4 are the easiest to pass.
Q 07What is a newborn baby's first stool called?
Meconium
It is tar-like, dark olive green and almost odourless, made of material swallowed in the womb.
Q 08Skatole, the main compound behind faecal odour, is used at low concentrations in what?
Perfume and ice cream
In small doses it smells flowery, and it occurs naturally in jasmine and orange blossom.
Q 09Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?
The wombat
The 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics went to the researchers who worked out how.
Q 10Why is the cube shape of certain marsupial droppings thought to be useful?
They stack and don't roll
Its intestine is believed to have two flexible and two stiff regions that shape them.
Q 11How often do three-toed sloths climb down from the trees to defecate?
About once a week
They dig a hole and cover it afterwards, a risky trip that puzzles biologists.
Q 12Kopi luwak, among the world's priciest coffees, uses beans that have passed through which animal?
The Asian palm civet
Wild-collected beans can fetch $1,300 a kilogram, though caged farming has raised welfare concerns.
Q 13Kopi luwak originated in the coffee plantations of which country?
Indonesia
Javanese farmers in the 19th century began brewing coffee from beans found in civet droppings.
Q 21The Lloyds Bank specimen, a famous fossilised human stool, was found in 1972 in which English city?
York
It dates from the 9th-century Viking settlement of Jórvík and was described by an appraiser as 'the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen'.
Q 22What happened to the famous Viking-age Lloyds Bank specimen in 2003?
It was dropped and broke
It was reconstructed and has been on show at the Jorvik Viking Centre since 2008.
Q 23Guano, prized as fertiliser, is the accumulated droppings of which animals?
Seabirds and bats
The word comes from Quechua wanu; the 19th-century guano trade helped launch modern intensive farming.
Q 14The male dung beetle Onthophagus taurus can pull how many times its own body weight?
1,141
That is like an average person pulling six double-decker buses full of people.
Q 15The African dung beetle Scarabaeus satyrus is the only insect known to navigate by what?
The Milky Way
Ancient Egyptians saw the ball-rolling scarab as the god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky.
Q 16Which country ran a two-decade project from 1965 to import dung beetles to deal with cattle dung?
Australia
CSIRO's George Bornemissza led the effort, bringing species from South Africa and Europe.
Q 17Dung beetles are found on every continent except which?
Antarctica
There are more than 5,000 species in the true dung beetle subfamily alone.
Q 18Ecologists in 1991 sorted dung beetles into three functional groups. Which of these is one of them?
Rollers
Rollers roll and bury a ball for food or brooding; usually the male rolls while the female rides along.
Q 19What is the scientific term for fossilised faeces?
Coprolite
They were first described by William Buckland in 1829, after Mary Anning noticed 'bezoar stones' inside ichthyosaur skeletons.
Q 20Which fossil hunter's observation of stones inside ichthyosaur skeletons revealed them to be fossilised dung?
Mary Anning
She noticed as early as 1824 that they often contained fish bones and scales.
Q 24What 1856 US law let American citizens claim uninhabited islets covered in bird droppings?
The Guano Islands Act
Demand collapsed after 1910 when the Haber-Bosch process pulled nitrogen out of the air instead.
Q 25Which South American country's guano trade dominated the 19th century, centred on the Chincha Islands?
Peru
Alexander von Humboldt brought word of it to Europe in 1802.
Q 26What did the Haber-Bosch process do to the guano trade after 1910?
Collapsed demand for it
Chile still mines a few thousand tonnes a year.
Q 27Rabbits produce and eat soft nutrient packets from their gut called what?
Cecotropes
They deliver vitamin B, fatty acids and amino acids that the colon would otherwise miss.
Q 28Ambergris, the perfume fixative once worth a fortune, forms in the digestive system of which animal?
The sperm whale
Fresh ambergris smells faecal and marine; it is thought to help the whale pass sharp squid beaks.
Q 29Whale faeces help fight climate change by fertilising what?
Phytoplankton
Iron-rich droppings from krill-eating whales feed the plankton that lock away carbon.
Q 30In Tudor England, what were the men who emptied cesspits at night called?
Gong farmers
They were only allowed to work after dark and had to carry the 'night soil' outside the town.