Most of us can name three dinosaurs. Push past Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus and the picture gets blurry fast, which is exactly where this quiz starts to get interesting. Every question shows one animal and asks you to put a name to it. Guess from the shape, because shape is what palaeontologists use too: a crest, a claw, a row of plates along the back.

Level one holds the species almost everyone knows. Level two rewards anyone who reads about this for fun. While level three is drawn from the smallest dinosaurs ever found, several of them no bigger than a crow, and it will humble most people. Pick a level and see how far down you can go.

How to read a dinosaur

Identification comes down to a handful of features that nothing else shares. Horns, crests, plates, armour and claws all evolved for particular jobs, and each one leaves a shape you can learn to recognise in a second. Colour and height help far less, since both are reconstructions rather than measurements.

Names help as well, because most are simply descriptions in Greek and Latin. Pachycephalosaurus means thick headed lizard, and one look at its 25-centimetre skull dome tells you why. Velociraptor means swift thief. Once you hear the pattern, a name you have never met still gives you a clue about the animal wearing it.

Sizes worth knowing

Numbers anchor the guesswork. A few of these animals sit so far outside ordinary experience that the figures are the only honest way to describe them, so here are the ones that come up most.

Bite force is where T. rex still stands alone. Measurements of its jaw muscles give the strongest bite of any land animal ever tested, living or extinct, and its conical teeth were built to crush bone rather than slice flesh. Meanwhile the true heavyweight of the Cretaceous period was a plant eater: Argentinosaurus, a long necked dinosaur estimated at roughly 30 to 35 metres and somewhere near 70 tonnes.

Curious how these animals measure against things you have actually stood next to? Our animal size comparison draws living species at one true scale, from a tardigrade to a blue whale.

The three great groups

Every dinosaur in this quiz belongs to one of three branches, and knowing which one you are looking at cuts the options down before you have read a single answer.

Theropods: two legs, sharp teeth

A bipedal dinosaur with clawed hands and a long balancing tail is almost always a theropod. The group holds every carnivorous dinosaur people can name, from the apex predator of the late Cretaceous period to the sickle shaped claws of the raptors. It also holds the birds in your garden, which is why a bird like dinosaur such as Archaeopteryx sits in this quiz at all.

Sauropodomorphs: the long necks

Four pillar legs, a small head and a neck that solved a problem no other animal solved the same way. Brachiosaurus held its head high like a giraffe, while Diplodocus ran its neck out flat and balanced it with a whip of a tail. Apatosaurus went thick and heavy instead, and yes, this is the animal you may know as Brontosaurus.

Ornithischians: horns, plates and beaks

Large herbivores with beaks, and the most inventive body decoration in the group. Plates, spikes, domes, frills and hollow crests all evolved here. Parasaurolophus carried a tube over a metre long that probably worked like a trumpet, and Corythosaurus wore a rounded helmet instead of a tube.

What the films got wrong

Jurassic Park shaped how a whole generation pictures these animals, and two of its most memorable choices were invented rather than discovered. Knowing the difference is half the fun of the quiz.

Jurassic World kept the tradition going with a Mosasaurus in a lagoon. That animal was real and genuinely enormous, but it was a marine reptile, not a dinosaur at all — and the same goes for every flying reptile you have ever seen labelled a pterodactyl. Dinosaurs walked on land, with their legs held underneath the body rather than sprawled out to the sides.

The small ones nobody guesses

Level three comes from the other end of the scale entirely. Anchiornis was about the size of a crow, Fruitadens weighed roughly as much as a bag of sugar, and Mei long was found curled up like a sleeping bird, which is what its name means. Several of these species preserved their feathers, and a few preserved enough microscopic detail for researchers to reconstruct their actual colours.

Sinosauropteryx is the best example. Fossil melanosomes show a ginger-striped tail and a dark band across the eyes, making it one of the few extinct animals whose real colour pattern we know. If level three leaves you flattened, the full story lives in our guide to the smallest dinosaurs.

Every species in the quiz

Thirty animals, from a nine-tonne predator to something you could hold in one hand.

Questions people ask

Which dinosaur had the strongest bite?

Tyrannosaurus rex, by a wide margin. Studies of its jaw muscles and skull give the most powerful bite measured for any land animal, extinct or living, strong enough to crush bone. It lived in western North America and disappeared in the extinction event 66 million years ago.

What was the largest carnivorous dinosaur?

Spinosaurus, at roughly 15 metres. It was longer than Tyrannosaurus rex though much more lightly built, with a tall sail along its back and narrow jaws full of conical teeth suited to catching fish. Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus were also longer than T. rex.

Was there ever an aquatic dinosaur?

Not a fully aquatic one. Spinosaurus comes closest and probably hunted in and around water, but how much time it spent swimming is still argued over by researchers. The ocean giants of the age — mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs — were marine reptiles rather than dinosaurs.

What does the name Pachycephalosaurus mean?

Thick headed lizard. Its skull roof reached about 25 centimetres of solid bone, which may have been used in head-butting or flank-butting contests. Dinosaur names are usually plain descriptions built from Greek and Latin roots, so they often tell you what to look for.

Is Brontosaurus a real dinosaur?

The name has had a complicated century. Brontosaurus was declared a duplicate of Apatosaurus in 1903, vanished from textbooks, then a large 2015 study argued the differences were real enough to bring it back. Plenty of palaeontologists remain unconvinced, so both names stay in use.

Which dinosaurs had feathers?

Far more than most people expect. Feathers appear across the theropods, including Velociraptor, Deinonychus, Microraptor and the early tyrannosaur relative Dilong. Birds are the surviving branch of that same group, which makes every sparrow a living dinosaur.