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50 free Woolly Mammoths trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This woolly mammoths trivia quiz covers the best-studied prehistoric animal of all, thanks to frozen carcasses pulled out of Siberian permafrost. It starts with the animal itself: how big it was, how long its hair grew, why its ears were small, how many times it replaced its teeth, what it ate and how it kept its trunk warm. Then it looks at where and when it lived and died, from the mammoth steppe to the last herds on Wrangel Island 4,000 years ago, and at its cousins, from the giant steppe mammoth to the pygmy mammoths of California's Channel Islands. The rest is history and people: Cuvier's realisation that species can go extinct, the hunter who found the first documented carcass, the Explorers Club dinner that turned out to be turtle, cave paintings, bone huts and Venus figurines, the calves Lyuba, Yuka and Yana, and the genome, CRISPR and Colossal Biosciences story of trying to bring the animal back. There is even a question on Ice Age's Manny. Our dinosaurs and Ice Age quizzes cover the wider prehistoric world. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the woolly mammoth, the mammoth genus and related sites and species, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which living animal is the woolly mammoth's closest relative?
The Asian elephant
Mammoths and Asian elephants are more closely related to each other than either is to African elephants.
Q 02How large was a woolly mammoth compared with today's elephants?
About the size of an African elephant
Bulls stood up to 3.49 m at the shoulder and weighed up to 8.2 tonnes.
Q 03Where did woolly mammoths survive longest, until roughly 2000 BCE?
Wrangel Island
That is about 4,000 years ago, centuries after the Great Pyramid was built.
Q 04Where in Alaska did an isolated mammoth population hang on until roughly 3600 BCE?
St. Paul in the Pribilofs
They probably died of thirst as the island's few freshwater lakes dried and eroded.
Q 05Roughly when did the last woolly mammoths on the Siberian mainland die out?
10,000 years ago
Island populations then outlived them by thousands of years.
Q 06Which French scientist first identified the mammoth in 1796 as an extinct species?
Georges Cuvier
The idea that a species could go extinct was not widely accepted at the time.
Q 07What does the woolly mammoth's species name, primigenius, mean in Latin?
First-born
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach coined Elephas primigenius in 1799, before the genus Mammuthus existed.
Q 08According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'mammoth' comes from an old Vogul word meaning what?
Earth-horn
Another theory links it to Estonian words for 'earth' and 'mole'.
Q 09Which US president helped turn 'mammoth' into an adjective meaning enormous?
Thomas Jefferson
He was a keen amateur palaeontologist.
Q 10The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth in Siberia roughly how long ago?
800,000 years
The steppe mammoth was among the largest, with bulls averaging around 4 m at the shoulder.
Q 11Which North American species interbred with the woolly kind, according to DNA studies?
The Columbian mammoth
It was larger than the woolly mammoth and is the state fossil of Washington and South Carolina.
Q 12How were the woolly mammoth's ears and tail adapted to the cold?
They were short
Its ears were about 38 cm long, far smaller than a modern elephant's.
Q 13How long could the guard hairs on a woolly mammoth's flanks and underside grow?
Up to 90 cm
Beneath was a dense under-wool up to 8 cm long.
Q 21The mammoth's haemoglobin carried three mutations that did what?
Improved oxygen delivery in the cold
Reindeer and musk oxen have similar cold-adapted blood.
Q 22What did glands in the mammoth's skin secrete to help its coat repel water and insulate?
Oils
The sebaceous glands would also have given the fur a glossy sheen.
Q 23What caused the woolly mammoth's distinctive high shoulder hump and sloping back?
Vertebral spines shortening from front to rear
Q 14Preserved mammoth fur is orange-brown. Why do scientists doubt that was its living colour?
Pigment bleached during burial
A 2006 study of the Mc1r gene suggests coats ranged from dark to light.
Q 15How many times were a woolly mammoth's molars replaced during its life?
Six
The final set emerged at about 30 and each of the last molars weighed 1.8 kg.
Q 16What did a woolly mammoth mainly eat?
Grasses and forbs
A six-tonne adult needed about 180 kg of food a day and may have foraged 20 hours a day.
Q 17Roughly how much food did a six-tonne adult mammoth need every day?
180 kg
That is about 400 lb of grass and flowering plants.
Q 18To what age could a woolly mammoth probably live?
About 60
The estimate is based on modern elephants of similar size.
Q 19The frozen juvenile 'Yuka' had a fleshy expansion a third of the way up its trunk. What was it probably for?
Warming the bare tip, like a mitten
The bare trunk tip was used for foraging in winter and could be warmed there.
Q 20The mammoth calf 'Lyuba', found in 2007, still had what in her stomach?
Milk
She had been buried near the Yuribey River for 41,800 years.
The shape is clear in cave paintings, which also show the single-domed head.
Q 24How much did a newborn woolly mammoth calf weigh?
About 90 kg
Calves were born in spring and summer after a gestation of about 21-22 months.
Q 25How were woolly mammoth family groups organised, like those of modern elephants?
Led by females
Bulls also entered musth, a period of heightened aggression.
Q 26What was the mammoth steppe, the woolly mammoth's habitat?
Once the most extensive biome on Earth
It stretched from Spain across Eurasia and Beringia into the Yukon.
Q 27Which French cave contains the most mammoth depictions, with 159 of them?
Rouffignac
Some of the drawings are more than 2 metres long.
Q 28Ice Age hunters built circular huts using mammoth bones as foundations and what as the entrances?
Tusks
The roofs were probably skins weighed down with more bones.
Q 29The Venus of Brassempouy and Venus of Lespugue figurines were carved from what?
Mammoth ivory
Two spear throwers shaped like mammoths have also been found in France.
Q 30Which human relatives used mammoth bones for tools and building before modern humans arrived in Europe?
Neanderthals
A specimen from Italy shows evidence of Neanderthal spear hunting.