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49 free Safari trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free safari trivia questions with answers. A safari is a journey, literally: the Swahili word reached English in the 1850s by way of the explorer Richard Burton. This quiz is a journey through everything the word now covers, from the parks (Serengeti and the Masai Mara, Kruger, the Okavango Delta, Ngorongoro Crater, Etosha) to the animals you go to see (the Big Five and why hunters named them that, cheetahs and their tear streaks, hippos and their 'blood sweat', elephants, giraffes, zebras, wild dogs, hyenas and meerkats), plus a little safari history: Roosevelt's 11,000 specimens, Hemingway, and the man-eaters of Tsavo. The early questions are for anyone who has watched a nature documentary; the later ones will test people who have actually been in the Land Cruiser: which country's rains flood the Okavango, how old the oldest baobab was, and what percentage of wild-dog chases end in a kill. Good for a pre-trip quiz night, a classroom geography unit or a zoo fundraiser. Every answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and each question shows its source.
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Q 01Via which explorer did 'safari', from Swahili for 'journey', enter English in the 1850s?
Richard Francis Burton
Richard Francis Burton brought 'safari' into English around 1859 in his writing on the expedition to Lake Tanganyika; the Swahili word comes from Arabic 'safar', a journey.
Q 02Which five animals make up the safari 'Big Five'?
Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, buffalo
Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, buffalo are the Big Five; the term covers both black and white rhino, and the buffalo meant is the Cape buffalo.
Q 03Why were the Big Five given that name?
They were the hardest animals to hunt on foot
They were the hardest animals to hunt on foot: big-game hunters coined the term for the five most dangerous quarry, and the safari tourist trade later adopted it wholesale.
Q 04The Serengeti's name is believed to derive from a Maasai word usually interpreted as meaning what?
Endless plains
Endless plains is the usual gloss of the Maasai word siringet, 'the place where the land runs on forever'; the neighbouring Mara takes its name from the Maa word for 'spotted'.
Q 05Kruger National Park became South Africa's first national park in which year?
1926
1926 is when the National Parks Act turned the Sabie Game Reserve, proclaimed in 1898, into Kruger National Park, South Africa's first; it later joined the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.
Q 06How many mammal species are recorded in Kruger, more than any other African game reserve?
147
147 mammal species are recorded in Kruger, more than any other African game reserve; they include all of the Big Five plus wild dog and hippo.
Q 07The Okavango Delta in Botswana is unusual among deltas because its river does what?
Never reaches the sea
Never reaches the sea: the Okavango spills into a tectonic trough in the Kalahari and mostly evaporates or soaks away; in 2014 it became the 1,000th UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Q 08The Okavango's annual flood originates from summer rains in the highlands of which country?
Angola
Angola's central highlands catch the summer rains; the flood pulse travels about 1,200 km down the Okavango over roughly a month, then spreads slowly across the delta, peaking in the dry winter months.
Q 09Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania holds what geological distinction?
World's largest intact, unfilled volcanic caldera
World's largest intact, unfilled volcanic caldera is Ngorongoro's claim: a large volcano collapsed on itself two to three million years ago, leaving a floor of about 260 square kilometres.
Q 10Which famous Leakey family hominin site lies within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area?
Olduvai Gorge
Olduvai Gorge, where Louis and Mary Leakey found Zinjanthropus in 1959 and the first Homo habilis fossils, lies within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO site since 1979.
Q 11What does the name Etosha, Namibia's famous national park, mean in Oshindonga?
Great White Place
Great White Place is the usual translation of Etosha, named for the vast mineral pan, dry and dazzling for most of the year, that covers nearly a quarter of the park.
Q 12Etosha was first proclaimed a game reserve in 1907 under which colonial administration?
German South-West Africa
German South-West Africa's governor Friedrich von Lindequist proclaimed Etosha a game reserve by Ordinance 88 on 22 March 1907; national park status followed in 1967.
Q 13In which year was Kenya's Masai Mara reserve originally established as a wildlife sanctuary?
1961
Q 21The African bush elephant's gestation period, the longest of any mammal, lasts about how long?
22 months
22 months, nearly two years, is the longest gestation of any mammal; a newborn bush elephant weighs around 100 kg, and both sexes grow tusks throughout life.
Q 22How many finger-like tips does an African elephant's trunk end in?
Two
Two finger-like projections tip the African elephant's trunk, one above and one below, letting it pluck single leaves; the Asian elephant has just one, on top.
Q 23Which hypothesis for zebra stripes is most strongly supported by the evidence?
They deter biting flies
1961 is when the Mara was first set aside as a wildlife sanctuary of about 520 square kilometres; it was later enlarged into the 1,510-square-kilometre national reserve in Narok County.
Q 14Roughly how fast can the fastest land animal, an African big cat, run?
93 to 104 km/h
93 to 104 km/h is the measured top-speed range of the fastest land animal; its semi-retractable claws grip like running spikes, and it hunts mainly by day.
Q 15The dark 'tear streaks' running from the eyes to the mouth are unique to which safari cat?
Cheetah
As of 2022 only about a dozen of the Asiatic subspecies survived, in Iran.
Q 16What are the closest living relatives of the hippopotamus?
Whales and dolphins
Whales and dolphins are the hippo's closest living kin: molecular studies group them in Whippomorpha, with the lineages splitting about 55 million years ago; 'hippopotamus' is Greek for river horse.
Q 17The red secretion on a hippo's skin, nicknamed 'blood sweat', actually functions as what?
A natural sunscreen
A natural sunscreen: the secretion, neither blood nor sweat, contains the red and orange pigments hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acid, which absorb ultraviolet light and also inhibit bacteria.
Q 18A feral population of hippos in South America descends from animals kept by which man?
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Escobar kept four hippos at his Hacienda Nápoles estate; after his death in 1993 they were left behind, escaped, and multiplied along Colombia's Magdalena river basin.
Q 19How tall does a fully grown giraffe stand?
4.3 to 5.7 metres
4.3 to 5.7 metres is the adult range, with males at the top; pumping blood up that neck takes an 11 kg heart generating roughly double human blood pressure.
Q 20Why is a giraffe's 45 cm tongue thought to be black?
To protect it against sunburn
To protect it against sunburn is the usual explanation: the dark pigment on the exposed front of the tongue is thought to shield it during hours of browsing in full sun.
They deter biting flies is the best-supported idea: Tim Caro's 2014 comparative study tied striping to tsetse and horsefly ranges, and later experiments showed flies failing to land on striped coats.
Q 24The last captive quagga died in which city's zoo in 1883?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's Artis zoo held the last quagga, a mare that died on 12 August 1883; the plains-zebra subspecies had already been hunted out in the wild during the 1870s.
Q 25The name 'wildebeest' comes from which language, meaning 'wild beast'?
Dutch
Dutch gave the name: 'wilde beest', wild beast, was what early Dutch-speaking settlers at the Cape called the animal, which is also known by its Khoekhoe-derived name, gnu.
Q 26Spotted hyena society is unusual among mammals for what reason?
Females are larger and dominate the males
Females are larger and dominate the males: even the lowest-ranking female outranks the top male, and she sports a pseudo-penis, an enlarged clitoris through which she urinates, mates and gives birth.
Q 27Hyenas belong to the suborder Feliformia; they are closer to which animals than to dogs?
Cats and mongooses
Cats and mongooses: hyenas sit in Feliformia, the cat-like carnivorans, and their nearest relatives are the mongooses and civets; their dog-like build is a case of convergent evolution.
Q 28A group of lions, the most social of wild cats, is called what?
A pride
A pride is the lion's group: typically several related lionesses, their cubs and a coalition of one to a few adult males; the females do most of the hunting together.
Q 29Outside Africa, wild lions survive only in and around which Indian national park?
Gir
Gir Forest in Gujarat holds the last wild Asiatic lions, a population that fell to perhaps a few dozen in the early 1900s and recovered to several hundred across the wider Saurashtra region.
Q 30The two man-eating lions of Tsavo, which attacked railway workers in 1898, lacked what?
Manes
Manes were missing: both Tsavo males were maneless, as many Tsavo lions are; Lt Col John Henry Patterson shot them in December 1898 and their remains are displayed at Chicago's Field Museum.