Short answers, pulled from the story.
Zond 5 carried two Russian tortoises (Agrionemys horsfieldii), fruit fly eggs, plant cells from wheat, barley, pea, pine, carrots, and tomatoes, specimens of the wildflower Tradescantia paludosa, three strains of the green algae Chlorella, and one strain of lysogenic bacteria. The tortoises were the first complex animals to travel beyond low Earth orbit.
Zond 5 launched on the 14th of September 1968 at 21:42 UTC from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The entire journey lasted 6 days, 18 hours, and 24 minutes, with the spacecraft splashing down in the Indian Ocean on the 21st of September 1968.
Zond 5's guided reentry system switched itself off erroneously during the return journey, and the spacecraft came down in the Indian Ocean rather than the planned landing zone in Kazakhstan. U.S. sources noted that the steep reentry angle would have been unsurvivable for a human crew, and the unplanned landing location caused the recovery to take ten hours.
On the 19th of September 1968, cosmonauts Pavel Popovich, Valery Bykovsky, and Vitaly Sevastyanov transmitted voice communications from the Yevpatoria mission control center in the Crimea through the spacecraft, making it appear they were aboard and orbiting the Moon. Jodrell Bank Observatory and the CIA both intercepted the transmissions, alarming U.S. officials. Popovich later described it as deliberate "hooliganism" carried out after the cosmonauts learned they would not actually fly to the Moon.
The tortoises were dissected on the 11th of October 1968, after a total fast of 39 days. The two that flew had lost 10% of their body weight, compared to 5% for the control tortoises, but showed no loss of appetite. Blood analyses found no differences between the flight animals and the controls, though the flight tortoises did show elevated iron and glycogen levels in their livers and changes to their spleens, attributed primarily to starvation rather than spaceflight.
The Zond 5 reentry capsule is on display at the RKK Energiya museum in Moscow Oblast, Russia.