Rhinoceros Trivia
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56 free Rhinoceros trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This rhinoceros trivia quiz covers all five living species (white, black, Indian, Javan and Sumatran), what their horns are actually made of, why 'white' rhino probably has nothing to do with the Dutch word for 'wide', how long a rhino pregnancy lasts, why the Sumatran rhino is hairy and related to the woolly rhinoceros, and what happened to Elasmotherium and the other Ice Age giants. It also covers rhinos and people: Linnaeus filing them under rodents, Dürer's famous and wrong 1515 woodcut, Miss Clara touring 18th-century Europe, Sudan the last male northern white and the two females guarded at Ol Pejeta, the Malay fire-stamping legend, the lavender rhino, and the economics of poaching, dehorning and horn poisoning. Every question was verified against a primary reference (mainly the Wikipedia articles on the rhinoceros, its species and the individual animals) and carries a citation. Play it alongside our hippo, elephant and Big Five questions for a full safari round.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Three of the five living rhino species are native to which continent?
Asia
Asia: three species survive there, though in far smaller numbers than Africa's two, which together make up the great majority of the world's rhinos.
Q 02The word 'rhinoceros' comes from Greek words meaning what?
Nose-horned
Nose-horned: the Greek rhino- for 'nose' is the same root medicine borrowed for 'rhinoplasty', which is why a rhino and a nose job share their first five letters.
Q 03Rhino horns are made of what material?
Keratin
Keratin: the same protein as hair and fingernails, with no bony core like an antelope's horn, so a rhino horn that breaks off or is trimmed above the base slowly grows back.
Q 04Like horses, rhinoceroses belong to which group of hoofed mammals?
Odd-toed ungulates
Odd-toed ungulates: rhinos stand on three toes per foot and, like horses, ferment food in the hindgut, which lets them live on coarse, fibrous plants.
Q 05Which two rhino species have no front teeth and pluck their food with their lips instead?
Black and white
Black and white: both African rhinos lack incisors altogether, while Asian rhinos keep tusk-like lower ones and fight with those more than with their horns.
Q 06Which two countries drove the market for rhino horn through the 2010s?
China and Vietnam
China and Vietnam: buyers take horn as traditional medicine and, increasingly, flaunt it as a status symbol of wealth, a demand that pushed poaching in Africa to record levels.
Q 07In which country is rhino horn prized for the handle of the jambiya, a curved dagger worn by men?
Yemen
Yemen: a jambiya marks a boy's coming of age, and demand for horn hilts made the country a major market for poached horn in the 1970s and 1980s, despite an import ban in 1982.
Q 08What is the collective noun for a group of rhinoceroses?
A crash
A crash: apt for animals that can gallop at 30 miles an hour, though black rhinos usually live alone and it is the more sociable white rhino that tends to form groups.
Q 09Going by teeth, Linnaeus in 1758 grouped rhinos with which animals?
Rodents
Rodents: his order Glires took in mammals with two cutting front teeth in each jaw, which filed the rhinoceros beside porcupines, hares, beavers, mice and squirrels.
Q 10Which is the smallest living rhino species?
Sumatran
Sumatran: also called the hairy rhino for its coat of reddish hair, it usually weighs under a tonne, and forest loss has left the survivors so scattered that they struggle to meet and breed.
Q 11Which of a rhinoceros's senses is notoriously poor?
Eyesight
Eyesight: a black rhino can fail to spot a person standing 30 metres off, so it leans on sharp hearing and smell, and its habit of charging at whatever startles it earned an unfair name for bad temper.
Q 12Elasmotherium, a giant Ice Age rhino, is popularly nicknamed the 'Siberian' what?
Unicorn
Unicorn: the nickname comes from the single huge horn it is thought to have carried, and new dating shows it survived until at least 39,000 years ago, overlapping with modern humans.
Q 13The black rhino uses its pointed, hooked upper lip mainly to feed on what?
Leaves and twigs
Leaves and twigs: the black rhino is a browser, using its lip like a finger to pull acacia shoots into its mouth, and it will break down taller plants with its horn to reach more.
Q 21White rhinos keep returning to shared dung heaps called middens, mainly to do what?
Leave scent messages
Leave scent messages: a midden works like a noticeboard telling each visitor who else is around, and only a territorial bull kicks his dung about to advertise that the patch is his.
Q 22Black rhinos airlifted to new homes by helicopter are often flown in what position?
Upside down by their feet
Upside down by their feet: a study that hung 12 tranquillised rhinos from a crane found they breathed better that way than lying on their sides, and it won a 2021 Ig Nobel Prize.
Q 23Which black rhino subspecies was declared extinct in November 2011?
West African
Q 14Why do rhinos spend so much time wallowing in mud?
To cool off and deter insects
To cool off and deter insects: a mud coat also works as sunscreen, because rhino skin is thick but sensitive, with blood vessels near the surface, so it burns and scars easily.
Q 15How do male rhinos check whether a female is ready to breed?
By tasting her urine
By tasting her urine: he then curls back his upper lip to draw the scent to an organ in the roof of his mouth, and may shadow a female nearing oestrus for up to 20 days.
Q 16Roughly how long does a white rhinoceros pregnancy last?
About 16 months
About 16 months: so long a pregnancy is a large part of why a female white rhino produces only one calf every few years.
Q 17What is an adult female rhinoceros called?
Cow
Cow: a male is a bull and the young a calf, and a cow keeps her calf at her side for two to three years, until her next one is about to arrive.
Q 18Which rhino recovered from fewer than 100 animals around 1900 to become the most numerous on Earth?
Southern white
Southern white: hunted down to a few dozen animals in a single region, it was rebuilt by decades of protection and moving rhinos to new reserves, though poaching has cut numbers again since 2012.
Q 19A popular but unproven story says 'white' rhino is a mishearing of an Afrikaans word meaning what?
Wide
Wide: the tale says English speakers misheard 'wyd', describing the animal's broad mouth, but a review of Dutch and Afrikaans writing found no such usage, and the name's real origin is unknown.
Q 20The white rhino's flat, square lip is an adaptation for doing what?
Grazing grass
Grazing grass: the broad mouth crops turf like a mower, and white rhinos clip it so short that they create 'grazing lawns' that feed smaller herbivores and act as firebreaks.
West African: the IUCN's 2011 Red List update found no wild black rhinos left in West Africa, and its scientists said the outcome could have been very different had the protection they urged been put in place.
Q 24Despite their names, what colour are both black rhinos and white rhinos?
Grey
Grey: there is no colour difference between the two species, and the shade a rhino shows on any given day mostly comes from the local soil it last rolled in.
Q 25The Indian rhinoceros is also known by what name?
Greater one-horned
Greater one-horned: hunted down to fewer than 200 animals in the 20th century, it has since recovered to around 4,000 under strict protection.
Q 26Which national park is home to more than half of the world's Indian rhinos?
Kaziranga
Kaziranga: its rhinos were nearly gone when Mary Curzon, the American-born wife of India's viceroy, visited in 1904 and urged him to protect the area, which became a reserve the next year.
Q 27The entire wild population of Javan rhinos lives in which national park?
Ujung Kulon
Ujung Kulon: the park's rhinos had recovered from fewer than 30 animals in 1967, but poachers arrested in recent years confessed to killing 26, perhaps a third of those left.
Q 28What sets most female Javan rhinos apart from every other living rhino?
They have no horn
They have no horn: many females grow only a small knob at most, and even males carry the shortest horn of any rhino, which they rub into wallow mud more than they fight with it.
Q 29The last Javan rhino outside Indonesia was found shot with its horn cut off in which country?
Vietnam
Vietnam: the animal died in Cat Tien National Park, where DNA from dung had shown it was the only rhino left, and the species was declared extinct in the country in 2011.
Q 30Teleoceras, an extinct rhino with a barrel body and stubby legs, was built much like which living animal?
Hippo
Hippo: the likeness is close enough that scientists still debate whether it also spent its days half-submerged in water or kept to dry land.