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Dinosaur Trivia Questions for Kids and Families
Thirty roaring good dinosaur trivia questions with answers, from bony tail clubs to feathered raptors, going from easy to hard. Perfect for young dinosaur fans and their grown-ups.
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Easy dinosaur trivia questions for kids
1.What do we call the remains or traces of ancient living things preserved in rock?
Fossils. Footprints and even dinosaur droppings can become fossils.
2.What did Triceratops mainly eat?
Plants. It had a sharp beak for snipping tough plants.
3.Did any non-bird dinosaurs live at the same time as people?
No. They died out tens of millions of years before the first humans appeared.
4.Ankylosaurus had a big bony club at the end of its what?
Its tail. Its back was covered in bony armor plates.
5.How did dinosaurs have their babies?
By laying eggs. Some dinosaur nests have been found with eggs laid in neat circles.
6.Meat-eating dinosaurs, called theropods, walked on how many legs?
Two. Their front limbs were shorter and were used for jobs like grabbing.
7.Pachycephalosaurus had a big bony dome on what part of its body?
Its head. Its name means 'thick-headed lizard,' and spikes and bumps ringed the dome.
8.Where did the giant reptile Mosasaurus live: on land, in the sea or in the sky?
In the sea. Mosasaurus was not a dinosaur. It belonged to the same reptile group as lizards and snakes.
9.When a kind of animal or plant has died out completely, we say it is what?
Extinct. Scientists count five mass extinctions in Earth's history, when huge numbers of species died out.
10.Deinonychus, whose name means 'terrible claw,' had a big curved claw on the second toe of each what?
Foot. It held the claw up off the ground to keep it sharp.
11.Did Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex ever meet?
No. Stegosaurus died out about 80 million years before T. rex. That's more time than separates T. rex from us!
12.Dinosaurs belong to which big animal group: mammals, reptiles or amphibians?
Reptiles. Mammals lived in the dinosaur age too, but they mostly stayed no bigger than a cat.
Medium dinosaur trivia questions
13.Which dinosaur's name means 'tyrant lizard king'?
Tyrannosaurus rex. Rex is the Latin word for king.
14.Fossils show that Velociraptor had what on its arms?
Feathers. Small bumps on a Velociraptor arm bone show where feathers were attached.
15.Spinosaurus is famous for what on its back?
A tall sail. Many scientists think Spinosaurus spent much of its time in and around water.
16.The biggest dinosaurs, like Argentinosaurus, belonged to which group?
Sauropods. Sauropods were long-necked, four-legged giants, the biggest land animals that ever lived.
17.Which long-necked dinosaur's name means 'thunder lizard'?
Brontosaurus. Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh named it in 1879.
18.Most dinosaur fossils are found in which type of rock?
Sedimentary rock. Rock that forms in great heat or under huge pressure usually destroys fossils.
19.Which U.S. national park site on the Colorado-Utah border has a cliff with about 1,500 dinosaur bones on view?
Dinosaur National Monument. Dinosaurs roamed there about 150 million years ago, and the bones are still in the rock.
20.In the 1920s, explorer Roy Chapman Andrews found famous dinosaur eggs in which Asian desert?
The Gobi Desert. Andrews named the spot the Flaming Cliffs. It is in Mongolia.
21.Which dinosaur's name means 'egg thief'?
Oviraptor. The first one was found on a nest, but later finds showed it was caring for its own eggs.
22.Which living reptiles are closer cousins of the dinosaurs: crocodiles or lizards?
Crocodiles. Crocodiles and dinosaurs both belong to the archosaurs, a name often read as 'ruling reptiles.'
Hard dinosaur trivia questions for adults
23.Which famous dinosaur had a spiky thumb on each hand?
Iguanodon. The thumb spike was first thought to be a horn on its nose.
24.Which Montana dinosaur's name means 'good mother lizard'?
Maiasaura. Scientists found 14 of its nests in one spot in Montana, which is how Egg Mountain got its name.
25.Which crow-sized feathered dinosaur from China had wings on its legs as well as its arms?
Microraptor. Scientists first thought it could only glide, but it could probably really fly.
26.Which dinosaur, dug up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1858, is New Jersey's official state dinosaur?
Hadrosaurus. When it was described, it was one of the most complete dinosaur skeletons known.
27.Dippy, the skeleton cast in the main hall of London's Natural History Museum from 1979 to 2017, is which dinosaur?
Diplodocus. Andrew Carnegie gave the museum the cast in 1905, copied from a skeleton in the United States.
28.Which plant-eating dinosaur from Mongolia had hand claws about 50 cm (20 inches) long?
Therizinosaurus. Its name means 'scythe lizard,' after farm tools with long curved blades.
29.Which big meat-eating dinosaur is the official state fossil of Utah?
Allosaurus. Utah's Cleveland-Lloyd quarry has given up thousands of bones, including dozens of Allosaurus.
30.What are the stones that some dinosaurs swallowed, which may have helped grind up tough food, called?
Gastroliths. Many birds still do this today. They swallow small 'gizzard stones' that help crush tough food.
Ways to use these dinosaur questions
Bring a handful to your next natural history museum visit and ask them while standing near the skeletons; kids love hunting for the dinosaur that matches an answer. Teachers can use the easy questions to open a unit on fossils and rocks, then save the hard ones about Maiasaura nests and Utah's Allosaurus for a quiz-bowl tiebreaker. At home, pair them with a box of toy dinosaurs: whoever answers correctly picks a figure and tells one fact about it. They also make a good car game on the way to a park with fossil tracks, or a bedtime round for the young fan who already knows every dinosaur name.
Play Dinosaurs trivia together
Room Trivia has a whole dinosaurs category with different questions: four answers to pick from, points for speed, and a scoreboard. Put it on a TV or laptop and everyone answers on their own phone. Free, with no app and no account.