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99 free Zoos and Zookeeping trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
10 free zoos and zookeeping trivia questions with answers. Explore the fascinating world of zoos and zookeeping with our engaging trivia quiz. Test your knowledge about animal care, habitat management, and conservation efforts that zoos undertake worldwide. Whether you're a wildlife enthusiast or curious about zoo operations, this quiz will challenge what you know about these important institutions.
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Q 01In which city is Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the world's oldest zoo, open since 1752?
Vienna
Vienna is home to Tiergarten Schönbrunn, founded in 1752 as a Habsburg imperial menagerie on the palace grounds and operating without interruption ever since.
Q 02What is a zookeeper's main job?
Feeding and daily care of the animals
Feeding and daily care of the animals is the keeper's core job; animal collections needing keepers go back to about 3000 BC.
Q 03What does the accrediting body AZA stand for?
Association of Zoos and Aquariums
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums began as the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, the AAZPA, and accredits institutions on animal care, conservation and education.
Q 04The vaquita, target of a failed 2017 captive-rescue attempt, is what kind of marine mammal?
Porpoise
The vaquita is a porpoise, endemic to the northern Gulf of California, whose collapse is driven by illegal gillnets set for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder fetches high prices.
Q 05What is the cooperative programme, launched in 1981, under which AZA zoos manage selected threatened species for genetic diversity?
Species Survival Plan
The Species Survival Plan, launched in 1981, manages selected species across member zoos for genetic diversity and demographic stability, most of them threatened or endangered in the wild.
Q 06Opened on 27 April 1828 for scientific study, which institution is the world's oldest scientific zoo?
London Zoo
London Zoo opened in Regent's Park on 27 April 1828, run by the Zoological Society of London founded two years earlier by Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir Humphry Davy.
Q 07'Zoo' is short for what?
Zoological garden
Zoological garden is the full term; the abbreviation caught on after Alfred Vance's music-hall song 'Walking in the Zoo', some twenty years after it first appeared in print.
Q 08Which was the first true zoo in the United States, chartered in 1859 but not opened until 1874?
Philadelphia Zoo
Philadelphia Zoo was chartered in 1859, delayed by the Civil War, and opened on 1 July 1874, drawing more than 3,000 visitors through its Victorian gates that first day.
Q 09Which equine, once extinct outside captivity, has been returned to Mongolia's Hustai National Park since the 1990s?
Przewalski's horse
Przewalski's horse survives only through zoo breeding: every living animal descends from about a dozen foals caught in Mongolia around 1900 plus one mare captured in 1947.
Q 10What term do zookeepers use for stimulating an animal's brain through its physical and social surroundings?
Environmental enrichment
Environmental enrichment shows up in the brain itself: animals in richer surroundings form synapses faster and grow more complex dendrite branching, while a lack of stimulation can impair cognitive development.
Q 11The oldest known zoo collection, from about 3500 BCE, was excavated in 2009 at which Egyptian site?
Hierakonpolis
Hierakonpolis, in Upper Egypt, yielded the oldest known zoo collection: elephants, hippos, baboons and wildcats buried in its elite HK6 cemetery around 3500 BCE, announced in 2009.
Q 12By Roman accounts, how many animals died in one day at Titus's dedication of the Colosseum?
Five thousand
Five thousand: Suetonius records that 5,000 wild animals of every kind were killed in a single day of Titus's AD 80 inaugural games, which ran for 100 days.
Q 13Which German animal dealer's Tierpark, opened at Stellingen in 1907, is considered the first modern zoo?
Carl Hagenbeck
Q 21Knut, the polar bear cub who caused 'Knutmania' in 2007, was born at which zoo?
Berlin Zoological Garden
Berlin Zoological Garden: Knut was born there on 5 December 2006, rejected by his mother Tosca and hand-reared, the first polar bear cub to survive at the zoo in over 30 years.
Q 22Knut was estimated to have boosted his zoo's revenue by how much in 2007?
€5 million
About €5 million: 'Knutmania' lifted Berlin Zoo's 2007 revenue by roughly that much as attendance jumped by a third; Knut died at four in 2011 of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.
Q 23Harambe, the gorilla shot at Cincinnati Zoo in 2016, was born at which Texas zoo?
Gladys Porter Zoo, Brownsville
Carl Hagenbeck opened Tierpark Hagenbeck at Stellingen in May 1907, replacing bars with moats and panoramic enclosures, a design copied by zoos worldwide.
Q 14In 1993 the body running New York's zoos changed its name to what?
The Wildlife Conservation Society
The New York Zoological Society became the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993 and rebranded the Bronx Zoo and its sister zoos as 'wildlife conservation parks'.
Q 15The Regent's Park zoo opened the world's first reptile house in which year?
1849
1849: London Zoo's reptile house was the world's first, and the zoo followed with the first public aquarium in 1853, an insect house in 1881 and a children's zoo in 1938.
Q 16Whipsnade, the world's first open zoological park, opened in which year?
1931
Whipsnade opened on 23 May 1931 on Hall Farm in Bedfordshire, which the Zoological Society of London had bought in 1926 to give animals open paddocks.
Q 17The San Diego Zoo grew out of animal exhibits abandoned after which event?
The 1915 Panama–California Exposition
The 1915 Panama–California Exposition left caged animals behind in Balboa Park; Harry Wegeforth founded the Zoological Society of San Diego in October 1916 to house them.
Q 18Which bookkeeper became San Diego Zoo's director from 1925 to 1953, one of the first women to run a major zoo?
Belle Benchley
Belle Benchley was hired as bookkeeper in 1925 and ran San Diego Zoo until 1953; animal collector Frank Buck had lasted only three months as director in 1923.
Q 19How many animals did the Bronx Zoo have when it opened on November 8, 1899?
843
843 animals were on show across 22 exhibits when the Bronx Zoo opened on 8 November 1899 under first director William Temple Hornaday.
Q 20The Rockefeller Fountain at the Bronx Zoo was originally a landmark in which Italian city?
Como
Como: the fountain stood in the lakeside city's Piazza Cavour until William Rockefeller bought it in 1902 for 3,500 lire, about $637, and shipped it to the Bronx Zoo.
Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, where Harambe was born on 27 May 1999; he was named after a Rita Marley song, harambee being Swahili for communal labour.
Q 24How old was the boy who climbed into Harambe's enclosure on May 28, 2016?
Three
Three: the three-year-old climbed a barrier and fell about 15 feet into the moat of Gorilla World; the zoo's Dangerous Animal Response Team shot Harambe within ten minutes.
Q 25The 2015 national survey estimated how many wild giant pandas over 1.5 years old?
1,864
1,864 wild pandas were counted in China's fourth national survey, released in 2015, up from 1,596 a decade earlier; the IUCN downgraded the species from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2016.
Q 26At which zoo was Hua Mei, the first American-born panda to reach adulthood, born in 1999?
San Diego Zoo
San Diego Zoo: Hua Mei was born there on 21 August 1999 to Bai Yun after artificial insemination, and was sent to China's Wolong breeding centre in 2004.
Q 27Jumbo the elephant was sold in 1882 to which American showman despite public protest?
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum paid London Zoo £2,000 for Jumbo in 1882 over public protest; the elephant's name gave English the word 'jumbo' and he became Tufts University's mascot.
Q 28Jumbo was born in Sudan and first exhibited at which Paris zoo before moving to London in 1865?
Jardin des Plantes
The Jardin des Plantes menagerie in Paris held Jumbo before London Zoo swapped a rhinoceros for him in 1865; a train killed him at St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1885.
Q 29The Central Park Zoo's precursor menagerie, the first public zoo in New York, was founded in which year?
1864
1864: the menagerie grew from donated animals kept at the Arsenal and was formalised that year; the present Central Park Zoo opened in 1934 and was rebuilt with naturalistic habitats in 1988.
Q 30How much did the 1980s renovation replacing Central Park Zoo's cages with natural habitats cost?
$35 million
$35 million: the rebuilt Central Park Zoo reopened on 8 August 1988 under the New York Zoological Society, replacing cages with a rainforest, temperate and polar zone.