Reptiles & Amphibians Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which South American river turtle has a knobbly shell like a slab of bark, a broad flat triangular head fringed with flaps of skin, and a long snorkel of a nose, and catches fish by suddenly opening its huge mouth and throat so that water and prey rush in?

Question 2

What is the name for the condition, seen in the axolotl, the olm and some populations of the tiger salamander, in which an amphibian becomes able to breed while still wearing the gills and finned tail of a larva and never leaves the water or takes on the adult land form?

Question 3

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 4

Which group of Central and South American crocodilians, close relatives of the alligator, includes the black species that is the Amazon basin's top predator and the small spectacled species that is the most numerous crocodilian in the world and the mainstay of the reptile-leather trade?

Question 5

Which small, pointy-snouted frog of the southern beech forests of Chile and Argentina has males that guard the eggs and then scoop the hatching tadpoles into the vocal sac under the chin, carrying them there through their whole development before coughing out little frogs?

Question 6

Which northern frog can be frozen almost solid through the winter, its heart stopped and up to two-thirds of its body water turned to ice, because it floods its cells with sugar as antifreeze, then thaws and hops off in spring?

Question 7

Which sea turtle is the only one that switches as an adult to a diet mostly of seagrass and algae, grazing undersea meadows so heavily that it keeps them healthy, and is named not for its shell but for the colour its plant diet gives to the fat under it?

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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.