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89 free Weird trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
85 free weird trivia questions with answers, every one of them a fact that sounds invented until you check it. There is a war that lasted under 45 minutes, a bear who held the rank of private, a dead pope put on trial, a city that danced for two months, and a wave of molasses that outran people through the streets of Boston. The animal round covers cube-shaped droppings, three-hearted octopuses, an immortal jellyfish and a frog that freezes solid for the winter. Science and space bring a planet whose day outlasts its year, blue sunsets on Mars and a gene named after Sonic the Hedgehog. There are strange origin stories too: Nintendo's playing cards, Nokia's pulp mill, Play-Doh's life as a wallpaper cleaner and the first thing ever sold on eBay. Food, sport, geography and language rounds fill out the mix, so nobody's specialist subject dominates. It is written for adults and older kids who like the 'wait, what?' kind of fact, the craziest trivia questions and most surprising trivia questions we could verify: a pub quiz round, a long car ride, a classroom Friday. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so when someone refuses to believe you, the receipt is right there.
30 of 89 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal produces cube-shaped droppings?
Wombat
The wombat is the only animal known to produce cube-shaped droppings, which stack without rolling away on uneven ground; the gut physics behind them won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for physics.
Q 02How many hearts does an octopus have?
Three
Three: one systemic heart pumps blood round the body and two branchial hearts push it through the gills; the systemic heart stops beating while the octopus swims, which is why it prefers crawling.
Q 03Which animal is considered biologically immortal because it can revert its cells to a juvenile stage?
Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish
Turritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish only about 4.5 mm across, can revert from adult medusa to polyp when starved or injured and start its life cycle over, though it can still be eaten or fall ill.
Q 04In which animal does the female deposit eggs into the male, who then gives birth?
Seahorse
The seahorse: the female deposits her eggs in the male's brood pouch, where he fertilises and carries them, then expels the fry in contractions that can last hours.
Q 05Which of these is a berry in the strict botanical sense?
Banana
The banana: a botanical berry develops from a single ovary with seeds inside the flesh, which also makes tomatoes and grapes berries, while raspberries and blackberries are aggregate fruits and strawberries accessory fruits.
Q 06Flamingo chicks hatch grey. What turns the adults pink?
Carotenoids in their food
Liver enzymes break the pigments in plankton and shrimp down and deposit them in the feathers; zoo birds on the wrong diet fade to white.
Q 07Roughly how often does a three-toed sloth climb down to the ground to relieve itself?
About once a week
About once a week: the sloth digs a small hole, goes, covers it and climbs back up, and that weekly trip to the ground is the most dangerous thing it does.
Q 08Where are a butterfly's taste receptors?
On its feet
A female drums a leaf with her feet to taste whether it is the right plant before laying eggs on it.
Q 09What shape are a goat's pupils?
Horizontal slits
Horizontal slits: the sideways pupil gives a grazing animal a wide panoramic view for spotting predators while cutting glare from the sky, and goats rotate their eyes to keep the slit level when they lower their heads.
Q 10What kind of tree is Pando, the single Utah organism with about 47,000 stems sharing one root system?
Quaking aspen
Quaking aspen: Pando is a single male aspen clone in Fishlake National Forest covering about 106 acres, generally held to be the heaviest living organism at roughly 6,000 tonnes.
Q 11How do wood frogs of the far north get through winter?
Their blood and tissues freeze
They can survive being frozen at minus 3 to minus 6 degrees Celsius and simply thaw out and hop away in spring.
Q 12Which animal's club-like strike accelerates at around 10,000 g, one of the fastest movements in nature?
Mantis shrimp
The mantis shrimp: its club accelerates at around 10,000 g and moves so fast it forms cavitation bubbles in the water; captive ones have cracked aquarium glass.
Q 13On which planet does a single rotation (one day) take longer than a full trip around the Sun (one year)?
Venus
Q 21The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge University in 1991, was pointed at what?
A coffee pot
A coffee pot: the Trojan Room camera let Cambridge researchers check the pot without walking to an empty one; it went on the web in 1993 and was switched off in August 2001.
Q 22The famous 'first actual case of bug being found' in a computer, in 1947, was literally what?
A moth
A moth: operators taped it into the Harvard Mark II logbook on 9 September 1947; 'bug' was already engineering slang for a fault, so the note was a joke.
Q 23Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make what?
Hanafuda playing cards
Venus: one sidereal rotation takes about 243 Earth days while its year is 224.7 days, and it spins backwards, so the Sun rises in the west.
Q 14Which planet is less dense than water and would, given a big enough bathtub, float?
Saturn
Saturn: its average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, roughly 30% less than water, despite a mass 95 times Earth's.
Q 15Which body, discovered in 1930, has still not completed a single orbit of the Sun since it was found?
Pluto
Pluto: found by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it takes about 248 years to circle the Sun, so its first full orbit since discovery will not finish until 2178.
Q 16Sunsets on Mars are mostly what colour?
Blue
Fine red dust scatters light the opposite way to Earth's air, so the sky near the setting Sun glows blue while the daytime sky is butterscotch.
Q 17A newborn baby has around how many bones, compared with roughly 206 in an adult?
270
About 270: a newborn's skeleton includes many separate bones and cartilage pieces that fuse as the child grows, which is why the skull and pelvis start out in several parts.
Q 18Which is the only bone in the human body not joined to another bone?
Hyoid
The hyoid, a U-shaped bone at the root of the tongue, is held only by muscles and ligaments; a fractured hyoid is a classic sign of strangulation.
Q 19The right human lung has three lobes. How many does the left have?
Two
The left lung gives up room to the heart, which is why it is the smaller of the two.
Q 20The gene 'sonic hedgehog', which helps shape a growing embryo, is named after what?
A Sega video game character
A Sega video game character: researcher Robert Riddle named the gene after Sonic the Hedgehog in 1993; its siblings 'desert hedgehog' and 'Indian hedgehog' take their names from real hedgehog species.
Hanafuda playing cards: Fusajiro Yamauchi sold hand-painted 'flower cards' from a Kyoto shop, and Nintendo made playing cards for decades before its first toys in the 1960s.
Q 24Nokia, later the world's biggest phone maker, was established in 1865 as what?
A pulp mill
A pulp mill: Fredrik Idestam opened a wood-pulp mill at Tampere in 1865 and a second on the Nokianvirta river, which gave the firm its name; it spent a century in paper, rubber and cables before phones.
Q 25Samsung began life in 1938 as a small trading firm dealing in what?
Dried fish and noodles
Dried fish and noodles: Lee Byung-chul's Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu traded groceries including dried fish and its own noodles, and the group did not make electronics until 1969.
Q 26Larry Page and Sergey Brin's search project was originally called what before it became Google?
BackRub
BackRub: the name referred to the way it ranked pages by analysing the web's 'back links'; it ran on Stanford servers from 1996 before becoming Google in 1997.
Q 27Under what name did Jeff Bezos originally found Amazon in 1994?
Cadabra
Cadabra: Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994, but a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver' and within months it was renamed after the world's largest river.
Q 28What was the first item ever sold on eBay?
A broken laser pointer
It went for $14.83 in 1995; when founder Pierre Omidyar checked, the buyer said he collected broken laser pointers.
Q 29Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from what?
A 10th-century Danish king
A 10th-century Danish king: Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson united Denmark's tribes, and the engineers wanted a standard that united devices; the logo merges the runes for his initials H and B.
Q 30The shortest war in recorded history, in 1896, was fought between Britain and which state?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar: the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, ending when British ships shelled the sultan's palace and he fled to the German consulate.