Reptiles & Amphibians Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which slow-moving, bead-scaled, black-and-pink desert lizard of the southwestern United States and Mexico is one of the very few venomous lizards, chewing to work the venom in from grooved teeth in the lower jaw, and spends most of the year underground living off fat stored in its tail?

Question 2

Which thick, sluggish, superbly camouflaged African viper kills and injures more people than any other snake on the continent, not because it is aggressive but because it relies on stillness, is widespread near villages, and is easily trodden on, giving a loud hiss as its only warning?

Question 3

What is the name for the escape trick in which many lizards snap off their own tail along a built-in line of weakness when a predator grabs it, the discarded tail thrashing on its own to hold attention while the lizard runs?

Question 4

Which reptile of a few New Zealand islands, though it looks like a stout lizard, is the last survivor of an order that split from the lizards and snakes over two hundred million years ago, has a prominent light-sensing 'third eye' on the top of its head as a hatchling, and stays active on cold nights?

Question 5

Which North American Pacific-coast newt carries in its skin one of the most powerful natural poisons known, the same toxin as in a pufferfish, enough in one animal to kill several people, and is locked in an evolutionary race with garter snakes that have evolved to resist it and eat the newts anyway?

Question 6

Which brightly ringed New World elapid, banded in red, yellow and black, carries a powerful nerve poison but has short fixed fangs and a small mouth, so it must hang on and chew, and several harmless snakes copy its colours for protection?

Question 7

Which green East African mountain chameleon carries three long forward-pointing horns on the male's face, like a small version of a familiar horned dinosaur, which rival males use to try to lever each other off a branch, and it gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs?

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About Reptiles & Amphibians

This quiz is about reptiles and amphibians: the snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodilians and the lone tuatara, and the frogs, salamanders and caecilians, along with how they are built, how they breed and grow, the record-holders, the dangerous ones, and the myths and conservation stories. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an animal, a group, a body part, a life stage or a behaviour and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Sea turtles and sea snakes, held back from the Fish & Sea Life quiz, are covered here; dinosaurs and the extinct sea reptiles stay in the Dinosaurs quiz. It is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is the famous ones: the king cobra, the Komodo dragon, the saltwater crocodile, the green anaconda and reticulated python, the Galapagos tortoise and the leatherback turtle, the tuatara, the chameleon and the gecko, the Gila monster, the black mamba, the boa constrictor, the American alligator, the axolotl, the poison dart frog, the cane toad, the goliath frog, the Chinese giant salamander and the gliding tree snake.

The second pack is how these animals work: taking heat from outside, the shelled egg that freed the group from water, the tadpole's transformation, staying a larva for life, breathing through the skin, the scent organ in the mouth, the heat-sensing pit, the light-sensing spot on the crown, the clear eye scale, shedding, dropping the tail, winter and dry-season dormancy, nest temperature setting the sex, virgin birth, live birth, venom against poison, fangs, the turtle's shell and the shared rear opening.

The third pack is snakes: India's four biggest killers, the spitting cobra, the hyper-toxic inland taipan and the eastern brown, the boomslang, the sea krait and the yellow-bellied sea snake, the puff adder, the Gaboon viper, the bushmaster and the fer-de-lance, the rattlesnake and the sidewinder, the coral snake, the egg-eating snake, the death-feigning hognose and the tiny blind flowerpot snake.

The fourth pack is lizards, turtles and crocodilians: the marine iguana, the frilled lizard, the water-running basilisk, the gliding Draco, the three-horned Jackson's chameleon, the thorny devil and the blood-squirting horned lizard, the brittle glass lizard, the ring-bodied worm lizard, the green and hawksbill and olive ridley sea turtles, the alligator snapping turtle and the mata mata, the gharial and the mugger, the caiman, the Nile crocodile, the Asian water monitor and the crested gecko.

The fifth pack is amphibians and the human side: the tadpole and the eft, the caecilian, the cave-dwelling olm, the hellbender, the Surinam toad, the extinct gastric-brooding and Darwin's frogs, the freeze-tolerant wood frog, the see-through glass frog, the amphibian skin fungus, the golden toad, India's purple frog, the marsupial frog, the toxic rough-skinned newt and fire salamander, the study of herps, antivenom, the Irula snake-catchers and the snakebite toll.

The wrong answers are always other reptiles, amphibians or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of a marsh, a desert, a forest canopy or a pond, chosen because it names no species and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.