Quiz answers!

Round 1: Name the animal

1. Picture. This is fossa. Fossa is love. Fossa is part of weird family of Malagasy animals that are related to either civets or mongooses, but no-one really knows.

2. Picture. A splendiferous Inca tern. Tern would have been acceptable, because I'm nice like that. Terns are rather jolly too.

3. Picture. You guessed it, it's a worm lizard, or amphisbaenian. ^{You may not have guessed it, sorry.}

4. Picture. It's a coelacanth, more specifically a West Indian Ocean coelacanth, but we shan't bother with that. Coelacanths are awesome too, and while the group has been around for hundreds of millions of years, they have changed quite a bit. The three-lobed tail is what gives the group away.

5. Picture. This horny guy is a scimitar horned oryx. Sadly they're no extinct in the wild, but you can still find them at many safari parks and zoos, including Longleat Safari Park.

6. Picture. It's a blobfish! You're probably more used to seeing them like this though. This is what they look like with the pressue of an ocean on top of them.

7. Picture. Starting to get a little nasty now, this is a sand dollar, a flat kind of sea urchin. They're related to starfish and a few other things as we'll find out later.

8. Picture. This is a sea spider. Not related to spiders, they're not even arachnids- instead sitting just outside arachnida alongside horseshoe crabs and a little friend we'll come back to later on.

9. Picture. Yes this is a real animal! It's a (spotted) cuscus, a primate-like marsupial.

10. Picture. Couldn't find an amazing picture for this I'm afraid, but a few of you got gulper eel. Their mouths can stretch to huge gapes to swallow almost anything the depths can throw at them.

Round 2: Stupid babies

1. Picture. Yep, rabbit!

2. Picture. This slimy little fellow is a dogfish in the process of hatching from it's egg.

3. Picture. MANTIS SHRIMP! Obligatory reading and watching. Mantis shrimps are objectively the best animals on Earth.

4. Picture. Good old capybaras. Link and linky.

5. Picture. Aww, in' the baby crabs cute?

6. Picture. Mongooses! Silly little things.

7. Picture. Fire salamander. That is all.

8. Picture. These are young slow lorises! Slow and slender lorises are great fun!

9. Picture. Horseshoe crabs! More awesome arthropods, horseshoe crabs are closely related to sea spiders and sea scorpions, and sit just outside of arachnids.

10. Picture. This is probably the most difficult here, it's actually the fry of the heaviest bony fish in the world, the oceanic sunfish, Mola mola. Video.

Round 3: "What is this animal most closely related to?"

1. Picture. Racoon, bear, wombat, wolverine. Red pandas.. They're actually in the same family as racoons!

2. Picture. Cat, bear, dog, coati. Hyenas may look like dogs but they're actually more closely related to cats and civets.

3. Picture. Otter, tuna, hippo, sea lion. Hippos! It took science a long time to work out where whales and dolphins sit in the tree of life. Fossils pointed to hoofed mammals, but only with D.N.A. sequencing could we really find out. There are a bunch of hoofed carnivores between the hippo and whale, but the hippo is the whale's closest living relative left.

4. Picture. Ray, shark, plaice, guitarfish. Is it a ray? Is it a shark? Yes, it's a shark. More specifically an angelshark.

5. Picture. Sloth, lemur, kangaroo, squirrel. Another cuscus! As a marsupial it's most closely related to the kangaroo!

6. Picture. Racoon, lemur, monkey, bear. Aye-ayes are a really weird lemur basically. Video.

7. Picture. Hippo, bear, cat, rhino. Bear! Seals, sea lions and walruses are part of the group carnivora, and are along the caniform branch, close to bears.

8. Picture. Seaweed, coral, starfish, worm. Possibly the hardest question here? This is a crinoid, or sea lilly. They're part of the group called echinoderms, which includes the sea urchin we saw earlier, and starfish. Also included are sea cucumbers and brittle stars.

9. Picture. Wolverine, mouse, rabbit, elephant. Hyraxes are cool. They're also close relatives of elephants and manatees.

10. Picture. Plesiosaurus, crocodile, gecko, tuatara. This is kind of a trick question. Nobody really knows! The most likely two are crocodiles and plesiosaurians (I'll accept both), as in genetic analyses turtles come out close to the archosaurs (dinosaurs, crocodiles, pterosaurs), which is where sauropterygians are usually thought to be.

Round 4: "What is this fossil most closely related to?"

1. Fossil, reconstruction. Crocodile, turtle, snake, gecko. This is Mosasaurus, found in many places throughout the world including America and Morocco. They can grow to be 20 metres long, and are actually lizards, and very close relatives of snakes.

2. Fossil, reconstruction. Anteater, sloth, cow, deer. That second photo seemed to trick a few people. This is Megatherium, the most famous of the giant ground sloths. They actually lived until very recently, although my favourite is the marine giant ground sloth!

3. Fossil, reconstruction. Crocodile, Spinosaurus, monitor lizard, bearded dragon. That fin threw a few of you off I'm afraid. This is Arizonasaurus, an early archosaur and closer to crocodiles that dinosaurs. A lot of early crocodiles, including the awesome rauisuchians walked a lot more upright than modern crocodiles, and would have been far more agile.

4. Fossil, reconstruction. Anteater, armadillo, capybara, rabbit. This mighty guy is Doedicurus, a glyptodont from South America. They're close relatives of armadillos, as D.N.A. sequencing has recently proved.

5. Fossil, reconstruction. Crab, lobster, scorpion, ant. As mentioned earlier, this is one of the other fellows that sits just outside of arachnids. It's a sea scorpion, Pterygotus. They could get up to three metres long!

6. Fossil, reconstruction. Horse, elephant, hippo, rhino. Titanotheres like Brontotherium are one of those funny animals that look very much like one animal but are related to another. They are part of the same group of hoofed animals as rhinos, but they're actually closer to horses.

7. Fossil, reconstruction. Turtle, snake, dinosaur, lizard. As mentioned in R3Q10, nobody is exactly sure about these fellows, but the most likely answers are turtle and dinosaur, as they are thought to be close relatives of archosaurs.

8. Fossil, reconstruction. Elephant, giraffe, rhino, horse. The largest land mammal ever, Paraceratherium (previously Indricotherium) is actually a relative of rhinos. This is why reconstructions tend to have them with rhino-like thick saggy skin, although that probably wasn't the case.

9. Fossil, reconstruction. Velvet worm, earthworm, tapeworm, tick. Nobody knows! This animal is part of a group called lobopods, and they're weird as fuck. They lived for a short time around 500 million years ago, and nobody is quite sure where to put them. There are a couple of species that look like the modern velvet worms, but some like Halluceigenia here are completely and utterly different.

10. Fossil, reconstruction. Triceratops, Diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus. Had to have a dinosaur question somewhere, right? This is Pachycephalosaurus, one of the "bone headed dinosaurs", and they're the sister group of ceratopsians, including Triceratops.

Scores:

Thanks for answering everyone! I'll take a short break but I'll be back with another at some point! Muahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa!