Mixed Bag O' Science Trivia Quiz

Answer: Prehensile tail

Not all New World monkeys are able to use their tail as a '5th arm' but if a monkey does have one, it's from South America. They actually have more teeth then their African cousins (extra molars), and all primates have stereoscopic vision (3D).

Answer: Cyrus Spitama

There WAS a Cyrus (Darius's father I believe, or maybe a cousin), but THIS Cyrus was a Medean ambassador to the Persian court during the 5th century BC, when Persia ruled a good part of the Mediterranean world. Xerxes, the son of Darius, was the ruler who went down to defeat against the Greeks at the battle of Salamis.

Answer: A jellyfish, anemone or a coral

The Cnidarians are exclusively marine creatures which are separated into 2 main groups--the motile Medusans (jellyfish) and the polyps (corals and sea anemones) that stay put. The spider group is the Phylum Arthropoda which includes crustaceans, and most insects...the monitor et al is part of Reptilia and the amoeba group is part of Protista.

Answer: Radio waves

Frequency is how fast the high points in the wave pass from one crest to the next (per second.) Higher frequencies (gamma rays, microwaves, etc.) carry more energy.

Answer: 7

Here are the bones - ethmoid, lacrimal, palatine, maxilla, frontal, sphenoid and zygomatic.

Answer: Language

They went in roughly this order: Omnivory (started consuming meat in addition to veggies), bipedality (ALL the time), large brains, language

Answer: Aztecs

The Pre-Columbians tended to steal Gods from each other, but it was the Aztecs who built an enormous shrine to this God on top of the Templo Mayor in their capital of Tenochtitlan, now mostly buried under Mexico City.

Answer: Pure oxygen (O2)

Oxygen began to accumulate when plants began to colonize land and convert carbon dioxide to oxygen as a by-product of metabolism.

Answer: Louis Leakey

Donald Johansen found the fossils known affectionately as 'Lucy' (Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed after the Beatles song popular at the time) in 1974. Charles Darwin is the father of the Theory of Evolution, published in 1859 as 'The Origin of Species.' Gregor Mendel was a monk who dabbled in science and came up with first theory of modern genetic inheritance in the 1880s. Leakey found and described at least 3 new species during his lifetime.

Answer: Single-stranded

RNA (Ribonucleic acid) lives in your cells and helps your DNA make amino acids which in turn make proteins and thus US! Unlike DNA it is SINGLE-stranded which means it can go in and out of the nuclear membrane of a cell to talk to DNA. Present even in primitive single celled organisms and has been found to reproduce in ways that suggest it may be the precursor to DNA and thus all metabolic processes.

It DOES reproduce even in the absence of amino acids, and uses URACIL instead of thymine as a nitrogenous base.

Answer: False

This is an urban legend that has actually gotten into science books, because antique glass windows tend to be thicker at the bottom, like they are settling over time. Glass is actually an 'amorphous solid.' A material is amorphous when it has no long-range order, that is, when there is no regularity in the arrangement of its molecular constituents.

Answer: Fibia

People often mix up the names of the lower leg bones, the tibia and fibula, calling them the tibula and fibia! Your os coxa is one of your pelvic bones, your Patella is your kneecap, and your hyoid is a tiny floating bone over your throat that attaches muscles for speech and swallowing.

Answer: No dinosaurs were alive

Dinosaurs and humans are separated by almost 60 million years (although their relatives the reptiles are still around....so now we all know movies like 1 million BC are totally bogus :0)

Answer: Using more than one language in the same sentence

An example would be, 'Hola seniorita, how are you doing hija?'

Answer: Pangea

Laurasia and Gondwanaland are the two continents Pangea became when it first broke up. Gigantica never existed.