Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Taxonomy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every living thing that science has met carries a two-word Latin label, and behind that label sits a hierarchy that runs from the broadest groupings down to the single species. Carl Linnaeus built the system in the 1750s, and biologists have been arguing about its ranks, its kingdoms and its rules ever since. These 50 questions cover the whole field: Linnaeus and his Systema Naturae, the main ranks and how they nest, the kingdom schemes from the 18th century to today, the codes that police the names of plants, animals and microbes, the basics of reading an evolutionary tree, and the scientific names of animals and plants you already know, plus the jokes and tributes that taxonomists have smuggled into the literature. It suits a biology class, a pub quiz round or anyone who has wondered what the italics on a museum label actually mean. Play on your phone with instant explanations, or print it out; every answer is cited to a reference page.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly what share of Earth's estimated 8.7 million eukaryote species had been described by 2011?
About 14%
About 14% is all, so most species on Earth still await a name; the Catalogue of Life listed 1.64 million named species across every kingdom as of April 2016.
Q 02Which kitchen staple's epithet lycopersicum, 'wolf peach', was borrowed from a plant Galen named?
Tomato
Tomato is Solanum lycopersicum, and Galen's 'wolf peach' has never been matched to a real plant; botanically it is a berry that is eaten as a vegetable.
Q 03Which snake's everyday English name is simply its scientific binomial, a rarity among animals?
Boa constrictor
Boa constrictor is the only boid commonly called by that name in English, though every boid constricts; its subspecies' colouring earns them the common name 'red-tailed boas'.
Q 04Which rorqual's name musculus may be a Linnaeus pun, since the Latin can mean 'little mouse'?
Blue whale
Blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus, whose genus name means 'winged whale', and musculus can equally be read as 'muscle'.
Q 05Following his friend Peter Artedi, in which class did Linnaeus first file whales and the manatee?
Fishes
Fishes held the whales until the 10th edition of 1758 moved them into the mammal class, one of many reshuffles across the twelve editions Linnaeus oversaw.
Q 06Which animals did Linnaeus become the first to remove from the birds and classify as mammals?
Bats
Bats had sat among the birds in earlier systems until Linnaeus filed them with the mammals, a class he was also the first to name, as Mammalia, in 1758.
Q 07Which animal's scientific name, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, translates as 'black and white cat-foot'?
Giant panda
Giant panda is the species so named, and for all the cat in its name the animal is a bear, endemic to China.
Q 08Which lab workhorse's name means 'black-bellied dew-lover', after the dark end of its abdomen?
Fruit fly
Fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster takes 'dew-loving' from the Greek drosos and philos, and it haunts orchards, kitchens and pubs wherever fruit ferments.
Q 09How many kingdoms do US textbooks traditionally teach, having split the prokaryotes in two?
Six
Six kingdoms, Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaebacteria and Eubacteria, fill American books, while textbooks in Britain, India, Brazil and elsewhere stick to five.
Q 10A fungus found in Sarawak, Malaysia, was named in 2011 after which Nickelodeon cartoon character?
SpongeBob
SpongeBob gave the fungus the epithet squarepantsii, while its genus Spongiforma describes the sponge-like fruiting body; it is one of only two species in the genus.
Q 11Which of the three top-level groups of life takes its name from the Greek for 'ancient things'?
Archaea
Archaea, Greek for 'ancient things', got the name because the first known members were methane-makers assumed to mirror Earth's primitive atmosphere; they have since turned up in habitats of every kind.
Q 12Which eighth rank, proposed in 1990, sits above kingdom at the very top of the modern hierarchy?
Domain
Domain was Carl Woese's proposal once ribosomal RNA showed that the prokaryotes fall into two deeply separate lineages, and he had at first called his three primary groupings 'kingdoms'.
Q 13Which order did Linnaeus name in 1758 for humans, apes and monkeys, as the 'highest' of animals?
Primates
Q 21Which singer was honoured in 2011 by an Australian horse fly with a golden-haired rear end?
Beyoncé
Beyoncé's namesake, Scaptia beyonceae, was found in Queensland's Atherton Tablelands in 1981 but waited 30 years for a formal description.
Q 22Which Star Wars character names a Chinese trilobite, described in 2005 as its genus's only species?
Han Solo
Han Solo became the trilobite Han solo, the genus Han holding the single species solo, from Middle Ordovician marine beds of the Zitai Formation.
Q 23Which US president's hair inspired the name of a moth with yellowish-white head scales in 2017?
Donald Trump
Donald Trump's namesake Neopalpa donaldtrumpi was named by Vazrick Nazari to draw attention to fragile US habitats that still hold many undescribed species.
Primates replaced his earlier heading Anthropomorpha, and the same 10th edition gave humans their full two-word name for the first time.
Q 14Which non-living kingdom did Linnaeus rank alongside plants and animals in Systema Naturae?
Minerals
Minerals formed the Regnum Lapideum, and a fourth kingdom of minerals survived as late as 1860 in the scheme that first proposed Protoctista for 'all the lower creatures'.
Q 15Which ape's name pairs a Greek god with troglodytes, after a mythical race of cave-dwellers?
Chimpanzee
Chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes; Troglodyte had first been proposed as its genus name, but the wren's genus had got there first.
Q 16Which dog-like African carnivores actually sit on the cat side of Carnivora, among the feliforms?
Hyenas
Hyenas groom, scent-mark and rear their young like other feliforms, and early in their history they split into lightly built dog-like forms and robust bone-crushers.
Q 17Humans, sea squirts and the tiny lancelets all belong to which phylum, split into three subphyla?
Chordata
Chordata's three subphyla are the vertebrates, the tunicates such as sea squirts, and the cephalochordates or lancelets, all sharing a notochord at some stage of life.
Q 18Which single order accounts for about 40% of all mammal species, from capybaras to the house mouse?
Rodentia
Rodentia is defined by a single pair of ever-growing incisors in each jaw, and the order's Latin root rodens simply means 'gnawing'.
Q 19Which ape's name comes from 'wild men' reported by the Carthaginian navigator Hanno around 500 BC?
Gorilla
Gorilla was chosen as the epithet by Thomas Savage in 1847 from Hanno's 'gorillai', whose skins were reputedly kept at Carthage until Rome destroyed the city in 146 BC.
Q 20What is the plural of genus, the rank that groups the lion, tiger and leopard together as Panthera?
Genera
Genera is the Latin plural, and because the standards for the rank are not strictly codified, different authorities often carve the same species into different ones.
Q 24Which musician is honoured by a Malaysian huntsman spider that Peter Jäger described in 2008?
David Bowie
David Bowie's spider, Heteropoda davidbowie, came from the Cameron Highlands of peninsular Malaysia, one of many huntsman species in the genus Heteropoda.
Q 25A land snail endemic to Fiji's Viti Levu was named Ba humbugi in a nod to which Dickens character?
Ebenezer Scrooge
Ebenezer Scrooge's catchphrase gave Alan Solem of the Field Museum an 'irresistible impulse' when he created the genus Ba, and the snail is now endangered.
Q 26Which actor's Edward Scissorhands role named a Cambrian arthropod from Kootenay National Park?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp's Kootenichela deppi is Middle Cambrian, and cladistic analysis makes it the sister taxon of Worthenella.
Q 27When a species epithet honours a person or place, how must its first letter be written?
Always lowercase
Always lowercase is the rule even for proper nouns, while the genus name takes the capital; in normal text both parts are italicised, or underlined in handwriting.
Q 28Passer domesticus (Linnaeus, 1758) is bracketed because Linnaeus first put the sparrow in which genus?
Fringilla
Fringilla domestica was the original name, and the parentheses signal that the species has since been moved to a different genus while Linnaeus keeps the credit.
Q 29What is a name such as Bison bison, where the genus and species words are identical, called?
Tautonym
Tautonym names are legal for animals, even the three-word Bison bison bison, but the plant code bans them outright, which is why no plant is Larix larix today.
Q 30Which principle says the oldest available name is the valid one when an animal has been named twice?
Priority
Priority sent 19th-century zoologists digging up the oldest possible names, challenging those used by Louis Agassiz, Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen.