Animals Quiz

About this test

Zoology is the field where myths survive best, because every one of them is appealing. Bats are not blind: they see perfectly well, and echolocation is an addition rather than a replacement. Ostriches do not bury their heads in sand — they run at close to 70 kilometres per hour, which is a far better plan. A spider is not an insect: eight legs and two body sections against six legs and three, and the difference is visible without a lens.

Classification itself follows a few simple rules. Dolphins and whales breathe with lungs and nurse their young, which makes them mammals, not fish. A starfish has no backbone and no fins: it is an echinoderm, like a sea urchin. The giant panda sits in the order Carnivora despite a diet that is almost entirely bamboo, because classification follows ancestry and anatomy, not the menu.

As for records, only the cleanly measurable ones appear here. The peregrine falcon exceeds 300 kilometres per hour in a dive, while the cheetah remains the fastest land animal on the run — two separate records that get conflated whenever the mode of travel goes unstated. The blue whale is the largest living animal and very likely the largest that has ever existed, which is unusual for a record: it holds across the whole history of life.