12 animal questions with answers
Someone at the table is sure a koala is a small bear. Someone else thinks a camel stores drinking water in its hump. Both will argue until you make them pick.
Here are twelve animal questions, each with four options, a short answer, and a source. They suit a long auto ride, a quiet evening, or a group chat that has gone still.
How to run it
Read the question and all four options before anyone answers. Let everyone lock in a guess, then read the answer and the one-line reason. Nobody needs to keep score. The fun is in who was confidently wrong.
The questions
1. Which is the largest animal ever known to have lived?
- A) Tyrannosaurus
- B) African elephant
- C) Blue whale
- D) Giant squid
Answer: C. The blue whale. A measured female reached 29.5 metres and about 180 metric tons. Reports go larger still. It outranks any dinosaur we have on record. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
2. What does a blue whale mainly eat?
- A) Seals
- B) Krill
- C) Large fish
- D) Seaweed
Answer: B. Tiny shrimplike krill, filtered through baleen plates. An adult may take in several tons of them in a heavy feeding day. Size here comes from small food, eaten in bulk. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
3. Which land animal is the fastest over a short sprint?
- A) Lion
- B) Horse
- C) Cheetah
- D) Greyhound
Answer: C. Cheetahs have been timed at up to 114 km per hour, and they routinely hit 80 to 100 while chasing prey. The burst is short. A few hundred metres, then they have to stop or overheat. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
4. What does a camel actually store in its hump?
- A) Water
- B) Fat
- C) Sand
- D) Extra bone
Answer: B. Fat. When food is plentiful the animal packs it into one place on the back. When that store is used up, the hump sags or vanishes. Water is conserved by other tricks: less sweating, thicker blood cells, and a coat that keeps heat out. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
5. A koala is...
- A) A small bear
- B) A monkey
- C) A marsupial
- D) A rodent
Answer: C. A tree-dwelling marsupial from eastern Australia. The pouch opens rearward, like a wombat's, which is a poor design if you were hoping for a bear. The "koala bear" name is a nickname that stuck. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
6. How many hearts does an octopus have?
- A) One
- B) Two
- C) Three
- D) Eight, one per arm
Answer: C. Three. Two pump blood through the gills. The third sends oxygenated blood around the rest of the body. Eight arms, three hearts, still not a fish. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
7. Which is the only group of mammals that can truly fly?
- A) Flying squirrels
- B) Bats
- C) Sugar gliders
- D) Colugos
Answer: B. Bats. The others glide. A bat's wing is a modified hand, which is why the order is called Chiroptera, "hand wing". More than 1,200 species are recognised. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
8. Are bats blind?
- A) Yes, all of them
- B) Only the small ones
- C) No
- D) Only fruit bats
Answer: C. No. The phrase is a myth. Many small bats hunt with echolocation in the dark, which is why people assume they cannot see. They can. Larger fruit bats rely on eyesight. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
9. How many humps does an Arabian camel, or dromedary, have?
- A) None
- B) One
- C) Two
- D) Three
Answer: B. One. The two-humped animals are Bactrian camels of Central Asia. Most of the world's domesticated dromedaries live in India and the Horn of Africa, not only in Arabia. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
10. An octopus is which kind of animal?
- A) Fish
- B) Mammal
- C) Mollusk
- D) Crustacean
Answer: C. A cephalopod mollusk, related to squid and cuttlefish, not to crabs or fish. Soft body, eight arms with suckers, a beak at the centre. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
11. What is unusual about a cheetah's claws, compared with a lion or leopard?
- A) It has no claws
- B) The claws do not fully retract
- C) It has hooves
- D) Only the back feet have claws
Answer: B. The claws stay out, more like running spikes than a cat's usual sheathed knives. Extra pad traction and a long tail for balance do the rest of the sprint work. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
12. Why do some blue whales look yellowish underneath?
- A) They feed on sulphur vents
- B) A film of algae, diatoms, grows on the skin
- C) The skin bruises in cold water
- D) They swallow yellow krill
Answer: B. Diatoms. That coating is why older books called them sulphur-bottom whales. The whale itself is blue-grey with lighter mottling. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026.)
Where this does not work
This is a casual round, not a wildlife or pet-care guide. Do not use it to decide what is safe to approach, feed, or keep. Population counts and "fastest" records get remeasured, so treat the sprint figure as "true when we checked". If a question turns into a real argument, look it up together.
Use it in QuesMo
Each of these works as a four-option question in QuesMo, where a friend picks an answer and sees whether they got it. Questions with friends explains how a friend answers one in the app. To write your own, see make one good four-option question. Want another round? Try the everyday science questions or the space questions.